The Medusa Tree

April 28, 1997
Two stories--past and present--vie uncomfortably for attention in this slim volume. Narrator Marget, 22, has come, at the behest of her mother, to Northern California to check up on her two "grandmothers," Fan and Gerda. Marget's got more on her mind than Gerda's knee surgery: she's unmarried and pregnant. Her problems remain relatively peripheral and unexplored, however, existing mainly as a conduit for Dressler to tell the tale of Fan and Gerda, who became lovers during the WWII displacement of Dutch Indonesians. A mixture of European and Javanese blood is the women's only common trait. Fan, Marget's maternal grandmother, is the spiritual beauty, the orphan who needs taking care of. Gerda is strong, a tennis player who manipulates the Japanese occupation forces; after the war, she helps Fan and her infant daughter, Frances, as they move from Indonesia to Singapore to Holland and finally to the U.S. Dressler's first novel vividly evokes the mores, ambience and words of Dutch Indonesia. But, aside from some exhortations by the unsuspecting Fan to procreate, Marget's story is never meaningfully integrated with the tale of the grandmothers. There's character here, and setting, but there's not quite enough dramatic ligament to hold it all together.