Clarity is a bleak, comic, morally slippery novel about love, faith, trauma, abuse, memory, and the impossibility of ever knowing the full truth about another person — or even about oneself. Its central figures are Tom Barrie, a melancholy Lutheran minister who loses faith but cannot stop believing; Grace, his brilliant wife; and Bobby/Roberta/Ruby Stjern, a runaway farm girl whose life has been shattered by incest, pregnancy, violence, addiction and dissociation.
The novel begins in the voice of Bobby, born Roberta Stanhaus in Lakota Falls, Minnesota. Her father, Stan, is a respected local farmer and churchman, a “big shot” in a tiny town. Her mother, Nancy, is quieter, deferential, almost erased by her husband’s presence. Bobby grows up on the farm, loving two horses named Ruby and Stjern and dreaming of mountains beyond the flatness of rural Minnesota. She is bright, strange, rebellious, and more comfortable on horseback or with her clarinet than in school.
Then, at seventeen, everything breaks. Bobby becomes pregnant. The father is her own father, Stan. The sexual abuse has gone on for years, and her mother knows enough to say only “Persevere, honey.” Bobby’s mind cannot bear the contradiction: she loves her father, hates what he has done, hates herself, hates her mother for allowing it, and is terrified of the “guppy” growing inside her. At that moment, “Ruby” appears inside her — not exactly a separate person in a supernatural sense, but a hard, furious survival-self who can do what Bobby cannot. Her parents end up dead in the kitchen, shot with a shotgun. Bobby/Roberta/Ruby later gives conflicting versions: sometimes she remembers Ruby loading the gun and killing them; sometimes she remembers being out in the barn and hearing shots; sometimes she thinks her mother may have done it. Roberta, the practical self, stages the scene as a murder-suicide or suicide-suicide, places the gun, handles fingerprints, hides bloody clothing. Ruby scatters condoms around the bodies as a grotesque message. Bobby later shoots the horses too, unable to leave them behind. Then she flees to the Twin Cities.
