Sallyport - The Magazine of Rice University - Winter 2002

Of Bugs and Men - On the Bookshelf
Winter 2002
VOL.58, NO.2
Of Bugs and Men
Occasionally, a gender-equity conundrum stirs up the literary
community. It goes something like this: Why is it that so many men are
able to create believable female protagonists—think Wally Lamb’s
Delores Price in She’s Come Undone, a much-ballyhooed Oprah pick—
while supposedly so few women seem to be able to get inside the heads
of men and tell their stories as convincingly?
for the reading public.
Well, former Rice Ph.D. student Mylene
Dressler ’93 has entered the debate with a
compelling story told from the point of
view of Tristan Martens. Not only is the
main character in her novel, The
Deadwood Beetle, male, but the retired
entomologist finds himself late in life
facing both emotional demons and hope
for love—circumstances Dressler, a 30-
something former dancer and past
literature professor, can only imagine. And
she imagines well—which is good news
In the past few years Dressler has created some acclaimed original stories,
and her first novel, The Medusa Tree, was published in 1997. It is a
multigenerational yarn about a former dancer and her grandmothers.
Although her focus is again on family in The Deadwood Beetle, this second
novel is a little less close to home. This story is one of a father of a son,
who is in turn a father of a son. But the differences don’t end there. The tale
is that of a family lost and scattered—lost through wars, both physical and
spiritual—and the divorced professor emeritus is left quite alone in his
dark, dead-bug-filled Manhattan apartment. Estranged from his former wife
and his gun-hoarding, Bible-thumping son and family and an ocean away
from the remains of his own immediate family, Tristan seems utterly
solitary. The only spark of life from the outside world comes to him
through his sole graduate student, Elida Hernandez. But one day he
wanders into Cora Lowenstein’s antiques shop and not only comes face to
face with a woman he begins to hope will be in his future but also finds a
tangible piece of family history that he thought was a long-buried part of
his past.
All of which is somewhat overwhelming for a man who has spent his entire
life absorbed in the minutia of the habits of insects, beetles in particular.
Likewise, Dressler’s novel is inundated with little details—about beetles,
about families, about the Holocaust. It’s filled with the concept of how
small things—acts, gestures, words, intent—can have large, unforeseen,
and long-lasting consequences. For example, it’s the words written in a
child’s handwriting on a sewing table, “When the Jews are gone, we will be
the next ones,” that have far-reaching consequences and meaning for
Tristan. And the mystery behind those words is what propels the story
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