The interesting question this novel address is certainly worth asking: to what extent is someone responsible for the consequences if they know or suspect that a family member, friend or acquaintance is in mental distress, or dangerous, but fails to act on that knowledge or hunch? A loner Maine university student writes a dark and sinister essay for his English Composition course, and four years later walks into the local mall with an AR-15 assault rifle, kills four and then shoots himself. Recriminations and finger-pointing ensue and are massively amplified by social media, resulting in lost friendships and jobs, exacerbation of anxieties and depressions in many members of the university town community. The plot thickens as alliances and friendships are disrupted and realigned. I hope that the vividly described drunken debauchery and casual hookups of university students is exaggerated, but I do not know.places
Elsie Juska is a creative writing teacher in a Pennsylvania university and a lot of the writing is indeed creative, but also obscure, and some of it, to me, seems to be simply silly. In places, it seems as though Juska wishes to impress the literati who write erudite book reviews and may like such descriptions as “The heat crept under her hair.” By the time I got half way through I began to collect some phrases and sentences that seemed to be pure gobbledegook.
“A light snow of panic flurried in her brain.”
“She absorbed the article in fragments, like flashes of an X-Ray machine.”
“Her pulse was tripping in her veins.”
“The sky was purple, soft, foggy.”
” The shadows of the trees yawned across the lawn.”
“A loud sound, a buzzing, climbed into her ears.”
“Bare maples…..looked like naked lungs.”
“She had rivers in her veins.”
” Then she looked at her another beat.”
Where was the copy-editor and proofreader to correct the impossible assertions and nonsense syntax? At one point the words “Two thousand one hundred and seventy one” stand alone in the middle of a paragraph with no reference to anything. A man’s beard is said to need trimming, although at most it is 30 hours since it was trimmed. A girl drinks a 40 calorie vodka and Diet Coke. (A shot of vodka is 96 calories.)
The story is interesting but endless introspective self-analysis by most of the characters, the pretentious writing style and absent proofreading and editing grated on me. A good plot damaged by poor writing. But then, I am not part of the literati.
The Passionate Reader 