Review by Mack Hassler
“One Day, about noon, going toward my boat, I was exceedingly surprised,
with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore….
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
In To Be Marquette, a fine mystery novel by the young writer Sharon Dilworth, who has three collections of short stories to her credit already, the narrator’s professor in an ecology class at Northern Michigan University in Marquette is named Dr. Robinson and his class of eager students, who worship him, are called “his crusoes.” Defoe’s great early Enlightenment novel is about the practical adaptation that can be used in any situation we find ourselves to make the best of matters. It is a great hopeful story about Robinson Crusoe adapting to both the loneliness and to the necessity for change in the shipwrecked condition he suddenly finds himself. A few years later, the brilliant Swift made an even better parody of Crusoe’s practicality in Gulliver’s Travels. The narrative voice of Dilworth spread over time is clearly on the side of hope and Enlightenment rather than the “post-Edenic” hopelessness of Swift. Time itself is a factor, and several scholars that I know have pointed out the use of time in Defoe. Given enough time, most of us can rebuild a sort of Garden of Eden again. It took the Hebrews all of the Old Testament to do that, but certainly by the time of Christ, they were ready. A careful reading of scripture shows how much Jesus borrowed from the Hebrew history to build his message of hope and grace. Some critics, also, have called Defoe’s hope in his book a “thesis” in podiatry. Footprints are important in Dilworth’s tale too Missing persons and even murder.
Dilworth’s narrator ranges similarly. She is expert in all the moves of practicality: fix things as they need fixing; allow things themselves to govern when they need to be treated; let time flow as it comes to mind; be sensitive to surprise and to non-linear time, i.e. the unexpected. For example, she lets us know early on that the Professor has left the University and none of the “crusoes” has any idea where he has gone—a real shipwreck, just a few hints or footprints. But they carry on according to his teaching. They try to isolate and define each phenomenon of nature (each plant, each animal) as well as each government program of defense against nuclear attack along the shores of Lake Superior. They have “faith” in their methodology of the practical And so from the reader’s perspective the narrative is one interesting footprint after another, one more solution to a set of tests that the “crusoes” deal with in Dr. Robinson’s fashion In the ecology class of her freshman year, Dr, Robinson tells her and the other “crusoes” before he disappears that he wants them “to save the planet”. Pp 24-25.
In a real way, this is a grammar, a language of its own; and it is the Defoe grammar that Dilworth uses and uses it well in To Be Marquette. Early in the book, Dillworth’s narrator crusoe, one of the class, answers this key test question for us having to do with the title of her book so that we can carry the answer with us through the various locations and various moments of time in her story As in a Foreword, she writes, “I think it was then that I began to think of Marquette as a verb—to be Marquette was to be rid of the person I had been….” P.7 It is the infinitive form of the verb “to be”. This verbal permits us to move easily across time in its various tenses and to speak of various actors firmly as in conjugating that verb “to love” in our first Latin class “amo, amas ,amat.” It is, in fact, the most powerful form of the most powerful verb signifying “existence” itself. Any other grammar, I suggest, is just bombast. So I think Dilworth’s accomplishment in her first novel is both probing philosophically and entertaining.
To Be Marquette, by Sharon Dilworth, lovely cover painting by Tim Lindquist of 3rd Street Hill by Snowbound Books in Marquette (Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2024, 280 pages, $24,00 cloth.
