It begins with a “battered little sewing table.” An innocuous piece set among more valuable, more striking items in a Manhattan antiques store. The table has a secret, a message etched in a Dutch child’s messy scrawl underneath: “When the Jews are gone, we will be the next ones.” It represents the pain and the history of the characters in Mylene Dressler’s “The Deadwood Beetle,” this month’s Monday Book Club selection.

The novel’s narrator is Tristan Martens, a retired entomology professor who is isolated from his family (his ex-wife lives with his son, a religious zealot who has an affinity for guns) and hobbled by poor health. Tristan finds the sewing table one winter afternoon when he wanders into an antiques store. He is upset, shocked — the table belonged to his mother and he has not seen it since his family left Europe after the Holocaust:

Dressler

“I closed my eyes and glimpsed the table as I had seen it last, wheeling over my head, being carried away by a mob. Then I grew tight, defensive. As if I could have known my mother’s sewing table would return, all these years later, to promulgate lies. That it would come and sit here, inviting misinterpretation, misunderstanding, in this way, lying in wait in a corner, like a frog mimicking a stone. I ducked my head away from it. But heat still radiated down my chest.”

The table’s current owner, Cora Lowenstein, refuses to part with it. Tristan becomes obsessed with getting it back. He contemplates stealing it, and begins to cultivate a relationship with Cora. To each of them, the table represents something different and each must come to terms with the past that it symbolizes.

And while Tristan’s discovery of the table is a rather contrived plot device, Dressler’s wonderful characters make up for any shortcomings. Cora is cool, composed and elegant. Tristan is flawed, ducking the past and uncomfortable in an old man’s body. His plan to take the sewing table back from her becomes clouded by his increasing affection:

“I became anxious and unglued, consumed by thoughts of her. By the need, even if she wasn’t in the room with me, to look in the mirror and arrange my clothes and lift my sagging chin ... I was too uncertain, yes, unwilling to affirm what it was that was beginning to nudge us like tow turtles out of the sand; but I knew, at least, this much: that when I was with her the pain drained away from my legs, by degrees, and my stomach settled, unaccustomedly; that I was able to sit still, sometimes for hours at a time; that I could even believe, though I might never, never, never actually bring myself to it, that if I wanted to I could unburden myself to her, all my sins, into the folds of her glowing ears — and that she would still try, as she often insisted, to ‘be decent,’ and a ‘real friend.’”

Dressler’s novel seems to get off to a somewhat slow start, but as the story of the table unfolds, it is, as Monday Book Talk discussion leader Carol Campbell phrased it, “hard to put down.”

To contact Regina C. Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.