Page turner makes no mystery of tackling big issues
By Andrew Ervin |
July 22, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IF there's a middle ground between the pot-boiling, page-turning mystery and the novel of Big Ideas, Patrick Somerville has found it. "This Bright River," his second novel, is a serious literary tragedy of errors that also tells a gripping story.
Chief among the book's many intriguingly flawed characters is 32-year-old Ben Hanson, who has recently been released from prison, albeit a minimum-security one, where he was serving a term for arson. He has a history of heroin use and has blown through his million-dollar trust fund. His girlfriend has left him for his former business partner, who has used Hanson's handiwork to create a wildly successful video game. As a gesture of reconciliation, his wealthy war-profiteer father has thrown him a lifeline, entrusting him with the job of settling the estate of Hanson's recently deceased uncle, which involves leaving his temporary digs in Oregon and returning to the small Wisconsin town where Hanson grew up. Uncle Denny's house needs to be cleaned and repaired and put up for sale. Denny's ashes need to be scattered at a riverside cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
But as he's going through his uncle's belongings, Hanson becomes preoccupied with what really happened to Denny's son, Wayne, who perished under mysterious circumstances many years earlier near that same remote cabin: "Wayne's death was somewhere within the triangle of suicide, overdose and schizophrenic break. Maybe an accident, but maybe not. Maybe drugs, maybe not. (His body was out there for a week; the autopsy was inconclusive.) Ultimately impossible to understand. There it was: a puzzle, no solution."
A high school acquaintance of Hanson's named Lauren Sheehan is available to play Watson to his Holmes. A doctor, she has returned to Wisconsin to recover from a nervous breakdown and a failed marriage. As a further complication, she has post-traumatic stress disorder, having witnessed a massacre in the Sudanese refugee camp where she served as a medic.
On a visit to Madison to grill Wayne's former poetry professor, Hanson and Sheehan run into her former husband, who is either visiting from California for a conference at the medical school or is a stalker. A number of plot points appear to hinge on this sort of happenstance, coincidences and accidents that shouldn't work but somehow do, largely because Somerville is so adept at keeping the action moving - and at reminding us that our lives rarely conform to neat and tidy patterns.
He also bucks convention by explaining the extent of his central characters' emotional damage through flashbacks. Sometimes the changing points of view threaten to derail the plot, but the extent of Somerville's control over his narrative becomes apparent when the novel's back stories and present goings-on converge at the cabin. The revelation of a host of family secrets is handled so deftly you won't even mind getting sand in your Kindle.
Chief among the book's many intriguingly flawed characters is 32-year-old Ben Hanson, who has recently been released from prison, albeit a minimum-security one, where he was serving a term for arson. He has a history of heroin use and has blown through his million-dollar trust fund. His girlfriend has left him for his former business partner, who has used Hanson's handiwork to create a wildly successful video game. As a gesture of reconciliation, his wealthy war-profiteer father has thrown him a lifeline, entrusting him with the job of settling the estate of Hanson's recently deceased uncle, which involves leaving his temporary digs in Oregon and returning to the small Wisconsin town where Hanson grew up. Uncle Denny's house needs to be cleaned and repaired and put up for sale. Denny's ashes need to be scattered at a riverside cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
But as he's going through his uncle's belongings, Hanson becomes preoccupied with what really happened to Denny's son, Wayne, who perished under mysterious circumstances many years earlier near that same remote cabin: "Wayne's death was somewhere within the triangle of suicide, overdose and schizophrenic break. Maybe an accident, but maybe not. Maybe drugs, maybe not. (His body was out there for a week; the autopsy was inconclusive.) Ultimately impossible to understand. There it was: a puzzle, no solution."
A high school acquaintance of Hanson's named Lauren Sheehan is available to play Watson to his Holmes. A doctor, she has returned to Wisconsin to recover from a nervous breakdown and a failed marriage. As a further complication, she has post-traumatic stress disorder, having witnessed a massacre in the Sudanese refugee camp where she served as a medic.
On a visit to Madison to grill Wayne's former poetry professor, Hanson and Sheehan run into her former husband, who is either visiting from California for a conference at the medical school or is a stalker. A number of plot points appear to hinge on this sort of happenstance, coincidences and accidents that shouldn't work but somehow do, largely because Somerville is so adept at keeping the action moving - and at reminding us that our lives rarely conform to neat and tidy patterns.
He also bucks convention by explaining the extent of his central characters' emotional damage through flashbacks. Sometimes the changing points of view threaten to derail the plot, but the extent of Somerville's control over his narrative becomes apparent when the novel's back stories and present goings-on converge at the cabin. The revelation of a host of family secrets is handled so deftly you won't even mind getting sand in your Kindle.
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