At least that’s what Gil Duggan, Matthew’s uncle, has always believed.
Six years ago, when he was a creepy prepubescent kid with an explosive temper, Matthew Westfallen tried to drown one of his cousins. But wait until you get to the last section, a masterly piece of writing told from Dan’s increasingly muddled point of view. The book lags in the middle and, distractingly, switches to a no-quotation-mark style about halfway through. With Dan descending into the fog of Alzheimer’s, there’s a sense of urgency.
Another section appears to be narrated by Jane herself. That, and the fact that his mistress soon moves into the family home.ĭelving into the emotional fallout of this damaged family, the book shifts back and forth in time and perspective and is partly narrated in the present by Philip Solomon, a novelist friend of one of Jane and Dan’s children.
Suspicion falls immediately on Jane’s husband, Dan, a sharp-elbowed lawyer prone to spouting such unpleasant opinions as “I think all married men are a little unhappy, secretly, at least the ones who marry young.” The detective assigned to the case, Tom Glover, doesn’t buy Dan’s protestations of innocence: “There was something about Larkin’s performance - wooden, self-conscious, calculating, meticulous - that ignited Glover’s suspicion,” Landay writes. What happened to Jane Larkin, a young suburban mother who vanished in 1975? Her haunting absence forms the center of William Landay’s ALL THAT IS MINE I CARRY WITH ME (Bantam, 320 pp., $28.99), a gripping if occasionally uneven psychological excavation of a family’s past.
0 kommentar(er)
