“Discipline,” Colby English professor Debra Spark’s fifth novel, twists together discipline and art, in their varied meanings and usages, into a mystery. She explores “discipline” as both profession and punishment. She considers the role of art as expression, to be collected, appreciated, bought, sold — and stolen. The book intertwines three stories set in three different eras, as the reader wonders if, and how, the threads will ever pull together.

The novel opens in 2018 as Gracie Thomas, a Boston art appraiser, arrives on a remote Maine island to assess a private art collection. Her mind is not on the job ahead. Instead, she is preoccupied by her teenage son Jeremy, whom she has recently disciplined for spending too much time on the computer. Though she is consumed by the pitfalls of parental discipline, more pressing problems soon override those worries. After a two-hour ferry ride, she reaches the island at dusk on a winter evening. The ferry office is closed, her ride does not appear, her cellphone doesn’t work, and as she tries to walk to her destination despite the bitter cold, a chilblain swells on her big toe and her blood pressure drops. Gracie is off to a rough start.

Local review

“Discipline”
By Debra Spark
Four Way Books, 2024
$19.95

Despite her predicament, Thomas is able to find beauty in the island setting: “The depressing early New England dark had its upside. Overhead stars were spilled, salt on the black tablecloth of the sky.”

The plot suddenly swerves. Now it’s 1978, and Reggie, a teenager in Connecticut’s foster care system, is hauled out of a high-school class and abruptly flown from Bridgeport to Bangor, then driven to the hellish reform school Adelie in northern Aroostook County. Like the other kids at Adelie, Reggie, a wise-ass and a disruptor, has been let down by the adults in his life, a pattern that escalates at his new school. The student regimen he faces at Adelie includes finking on each other, humiliation and corporal punishment. Spark based the fictional school on the controversial, real-life Elan School in Poland, Maine.

The book takes yet another turn. This time, readers are witness to letters between a young married couple in the 1930s, both painters. J. Morrison and his wife, Victoria, exchange letters during several stays he makes at an artists’ colony. The letters, told in utterly convincing voices, reveal the couple’s struggles through the Depression and Victoria’s three miscarriages. Finally, J. Morrison’s artistic breakthrough comes at a gallery show in which he exhibits The Triplets, three powerful linked paintings of sad young girls representing the couple’s unborn daughters.

The Morrisons ultimately manage to have a baby, whom they name Lisa. As we meet her in 1979, Lisa is odd: “She had long hair, all the way past her butt, hanging in an uneven line, the raggedness suggestive of madness,” Spark writes. “She seemed somehow nocturnal.” Lisa lives in a large house in southern Maine, down a dirt road, where she attends to the business of her famous late father’s paintings.

Back at the island estate in 2018, Gracie finally appraises the art collection: “… the work tending (though not exclusively) to the abstract side of representation and entirely shunning (thank goodness) Maine kitsch (the seaside scenes, the lobster buoys and lighthouses).”

Spark drops the names of a number of modern Maine artists, then quotes Tolstoy: “Art is the means of transferring feeling from one man’s heart to another.” That seems to describe exactly what has happened to Gracie, who had seen, and been deeply affected by The Triplets years before. To her surprise, the paintings are missing from the collection. Finding them becomes her quest.

Back again to 1979, Reggie is smitten with Jessica, another student. Spark writes, “The air splintered around this girl and broke into granular particles.” But he suffers travails, including a serious injury after he declines to fight other students. Can he escape the horrifying school? In another plotline, the Morrisons have left behind a secret, but will it be revealed?

One need not know art to appreciate this story or art’s ability to convey passion from person to person, across time. Gracie’s passion for The Triplets transforms her from appraiser to detective, tracking clues across the country and then back to Maine, all the while improving her skills in the art of parenting a teenager.

New villains, bikers and even a hero riding into town on horseback make appearances in the novel. Spark’s depictions of Maine are detailed and realistic. I was especially impressed with her description of Portland and the atmosphere at the Preble Street shelter and food kitchen.

While I found some of the plot twists implausible, that’s OK: Implausibilities abound in fiction. Focusing instead on Spark’s well-drawn characters and themes, her flowing prose and the novel’s slow-building suspense made the book more satisfying for me.

Dewey Meteer is a former early childhood educator and a retired naval officer.