Michigan professor and writer Eileen Pollack’s new novel, Breaking and Entering, was named a New York Times editor’s choice and won the Grub Street National Book Prize. The Times review says, in part, “Eileen Pollack’s new novel, ‘Breaking and Entering,’ takes place in rural Michigan in 1995—the epicenter and high point of the militia movement, before increased scrutiny and revulsion at the Oklahoma City bombing put some militia groups out of business and sent others underground. (Though not a militiaman, the bomber Timothy McVeigh attended their meetings and spent time on a Michigan farm with his fellow conspirator Terry Nichols.) The Oklahoma City attack comes about a third of the way through Pollack’s book, a real-world event that informs and shadows the fictional ones. The novel’s main characters are not anti-government extremists. They are newcomers and outsiders, Richard and Louise Shapiro, who have moved to Michigan from Northern California with their young daughter in tow.”
The following excerpt is from the novel’s opening pages.
Louise’s avalanche of woes had started when one of her husband’s clients, a computer engineer named Sophie Pang, managed to swallow enough of her rubgy-playing housemate’s painkillers to put an end to her own pain forever. Sophie’s parents held Louise’s husband responsible, although their anger at their daughter’s insistence on living with her female “friend” rather than marrying the wealthy Chinese businessman they had picked out for her to marry was the true cause of the girl’s depression. They decided not to sue. But Richard blamed himself so unrelentingly for his client’s death that Louise was afraid he would sue himself. Lots of therapists lost a client. But Richard couldn’t accept his failure. To distract him from his misery, Louise left their daughter, Molly, with Louise’s best friend, Imelda, and took Richard on a camping trip. But there in Colorado, priming their little stove, he accidentally set fire to the canopy of tinder-dry evergreens above their heads. As forest fires went, this one wasn’t big. No one got hurt. The authorities let Richard off with a phenomenal fine, which he could cover because his father had insisted at their wedding that Richard buy something called an “umbrella liability policy,” which Louise had pictured at the time as the enormous striped umbrella her father-in-law carried in his golf bag. 
But after the case was settled, Richard wouldn’t leave the house. He saw his older clients, but only if they drove out to the house to see him. He wouldn’t spend time alone with Molly for fear he had become so accident prone he might inadvertently harm her. He refused to mow the lawn or use his electric saw. He wouldn’t cook or light the grill. Most days, he barely got off the couch. Louise missed the man she loved.
Before he misjudged Sophie Pang’s grief, before he set fire to those trees, her husband had moved through the world with an unpretentious confidence in the rightness of his diagnoses, the good will of strangers, his ability to operate nearly any machine, his talent in the kitchen, and his even greater talent in bed. After the fire, he couldn’t trust anyone, least of all himself. Louise tried to get him help. She was a therapist. So was he. For a while, he saw a colleague who specialized in trauma. Then Richard muttered a perfunctory “This isn’t doing any good” and stopped keeping his appointments. A psychiatrist friend prescribed the obvious medications, but Richard refused to take them. “Just what I need, to be even less clear-headed than I am.”
Month after month, Louise waited for his confidence to come back. But it was like waiting for your wallet to be returned; the longer time went on, the less likely you were to recover it, and even if you did, something valuable would be missing. For better or worse. Of course. But the worse wouldn’t seem to end. She tried to convince Richard that no one was saying anything behind his back except that he was taking his client’s suicide too much to heart and blaming himself too harshly for the fire. But he refused to spend another fucking hour listening to patients who believed their spouses owed them top-of-the-line BMWs or two-hundred-thousand-dollar kitchens.
When he decided they had to move, Louise couldn’t find the heart to argue. They were going under financially, and she was worried for Richard’s health. He had a cousin in southwest Michigan, and this cousin had a friend who worked at the penitentiary in a city called Potawatomie and swore good jobs there were going begging. Richard’s doctoral dissertation had been in forensic psych. With credentials like that, he could enter the system as a Psychologist P11 and rocket up from there. And so she agreed to move.
While their friends and neighbors cried and waved goodbye, she stood in their driveway strangely numb, as if she and Richard and Molly had been trapped beneath a landslide and her only hope of saving them was cutting off a limb. She didn’t want to be disloyal. Besides, she still loved Richard. And she couldn’t bear to think of Molly living in California while her father lived in Michigan. “We’ll be starting over, both of us,” Richard said, and even though Louise wasn’t sure why she needed to start over, she was determined to make the best of things. She would find new friends in Potawatomie. Molly would grow up in a place where kids rode their bikes to school and didn’t judge each other by the cars their parents owned and it didn’t take two struggling therapists every penny they earned and every minute of their attention not to fall so far behind in the expectations they had to meet and the distances they had to drive that they flew off the treadmill on which they were forever trotting and went careening into space.
But in the six months since they moved, Louise hasn’t made a single friend, unless you count the construction workers who show up every morning and tease her about how much she and her husband overpaid for their house. She has sent applications to every junior high and high school within a hundred miles of their town, but until now she hasn’t gotten a single interview. She had nearly lost hope when the director of special ed for the Potawatomie public schools called to say they had an opening. Louise was overjoyed. She was wildly overqualified for the job and figured she would be a shoo-in. She would meet people who liked to read. Music teachers. Artists. She just needed to give things time. Richard would get his courage back. Their marriagne would regain its spark.
And so, on this dreary day in March, she has driven to Potawatomie, where she turns in the high school lot and parks in a spot marked VISITORS, hoping that the next time she comes here, she might park in the lot for STAFF. Bowing to the wheel, she offers the sort of prayer a person offers before an interview for a job that might save her life. She locks the van, then stands in the misty chill looking up at the building she hopes to work in. POTAWATOMIE HIGH SCHOOL, SOUTHWEST MICHIGAN FOOTBALL CHAMPIONS, 1990-91. It reminds her of the school she attended in upstate New York, a Gothic W.P.A. brick-and-mortar fortress, which, unlike her parents’ house, seemed remarkably solid, not to mention that it was supervised by adults who, unlike her parents, seemed to have her best interests at heart.
She pushes open the metal doors, with their grid of wire diamonds embedded in the glass, and immediately she feels at home. She once read that dogs can sniff out the ingredients of a baking cake, and as remarkable as that feat seems, Louise is certain she can identify every separate smell in the corridor of a high school—the wet-sheep musk of drying sweaters, the boyish bravado of Brut and Old Spice, the zest of rotting gym socks, the hunger-inducing scent of cinnamon toast from home ec, and the cheerfully industrious tang of sawdust and oil from shop. She trots up the stairs and runs her fingers along the lockers. The gargantuan trophies in the display case are topped with brass-plated players almost large enough to be the real teenage boys who won them.
Please, she prays, let me get this job. Let me walk down these halls to my office and spend the morning listening to whatever students need me. Let me unfold my sandwich in the lunchroom and talk to the other grown-ups about whatever happened in the news the night before. Let me pick up my daughter from a decent school and take her home to an orderly, well-lit house. Let my husband come to bed and make love to me the way he used to.
