Shifting Perspectives

A few years ago, my teaching colleagues and I noted two significant aspects of contemporary fiction that are problematic for younger readers:  alternating points of view and the manipulation of chronology. As experienced adult readers, we are used to navigating modern literature but not so for our students.  We restructured our curriculum around the idea of narrative structure, exploring how and why writers use these techniques and to what effect. I am reminded of this as I note the similarities of the books I have most recently read

(admittedly on my third beach trip of the summer).  

I couldn’t wait for Lianne Moriarty’s latest, Truly, Madly Guilty, and pre-ordered so that I would have it the day it came out. The latest from the Australian writer, it has all of her characteristic aspects:  changing perspectives, movement back and forth in time, and a focus on relationships.  The story centers around three couples (Sam and Clementine, Vid and Tiffany, Erika and Oliver) and an impromptu barbecue at which something devastating happens.  The book opens several months later, flashing back to the events leading up to and during the barbecue.  It is well into the book – more than halfway – before you find out what actually occurred and why Clementine, a professional cellist, is giving voluntary talks around Sydney.  One review that I read protests that the event is not all that big a deal, but I strongly disagree.  The barbecue is actually the scene of several emotional events that become linked. 

Moriarty is excellent at creating characters with their own internal and external voices.  The three women all exude an outward confidence that they do not always feel.  They are also haunted by their younger selves:  Tiffany was an exotic dancer who (hilariously) runs into a former client at her daughter’s chi-chi private school parent function.  Erika was raised by a mother who is a serious hoarder, who neglected her child in favor of the acquisition of things to further clutter her house.  She has become a second daughter to Clementine’s mother, Pam, who forced a friendship on her daughter when she spots a young, neglected Erika several decades earlier.  Clementine struggles with playing her cello less mechanically and with more soul.  She has also harbored a resentment of Erika for years, her “best friend” that she has never wanted as a friend.  The barbecue event is really about the resolution of the tensions within this friendship and the self-actualization of these two women. 

Good as Gone by Amy Gentry opens with a chapter from the perspective of 10 year old Jane who cowers in the shadows as she watches her older sister, Julie, being led at knife-point down the stairs and out into the night.  The story picks up 8 years later.  Jane has just returned from a semester at college in Oregon, and it’s clear that she landed in the Pacific Northwest to get as far away from her Houston home as possible; her relationship with her parents, particularly her mother Anna, is tepid at best.  Then the unthinkable happens:  a young woman claiming to be Julie shows up at the door.  Jane and her needs are set further aside as both parents fully embrace their long-lost daughter who has clearly suffered physical and emotional traumas.  Julie says little about what has happened to her but agrees to counseling and the over-the-top shopping trips in which Anna lavishes thousands of dollars on her long gone child. 

The chapters alternate point of view between Anna and Julie, with Anna’s chapters moving chronologically forward and Julie’s chapters moving steadily into the past.  Each of Julie’s chapters is titled with a different name (e.g. Vi, Charlotte) reflecting the moniker that this young woman used at this stage in her life.  The effect of the Julie chapters is to gradually reveal what happened to this young woman and at the same time cause the reader’s suspicions to rise.  Is she really Julie?  If she is, why didn’t she come home sooner?

Anna’s chapters eventually reinforce these doubts when Anna is contacted by a private detective who has been looking for Julie and another girl who disappeared around the same time.  The detective shares Julie’s most recent identity and location prior to reappearing in Houston, sending Anna into a tailspin.  Anna’s chapters also reveal the source of her strained relationship with Jane; Anna has made no secret that she blamed Jane for letting Julie disappear, for waiting 3 hours before telling anyone what she saw. 

Gentry deftly handles the dual narratives, bringing them together in the end.  She also invites the reader to explore both the devastating effects of a child’s disappearance on individuals, marriages and on the children left behind as well as the consequences of naively getting attached to the wrong people.  I was put off by the rapes – which recurred throughout the 8 years of Julie’s disappearance as well as the sleazy sex work she ends up doing.

Sophie Hannah is one of my favorite mystery writers.  Her novels are characterized by a narrator, a woman, who strikes the reader as unreliable, who comes to the police with a story that, on the surface, seems impossible.  Her continuing detectives, DS Charlie Zailer and DC Simon Waterhouse, work to unravel the crime as well as the mystery of their relationship with each other. The Truth-Teller’s Lie opens with a horrible abduction scene in which a young woman is kidnapped, tied to a bed, and repeatedly raped in front of a group that seems to be having a dinner party.  (Yes, I am wondering about reading two books in a row with rape.) Fast forward three years when Naomi Jenkins, alarmed that her married lover has not shown up for their regular Thursday night rendezvous, breaks their rule and goes to his house where she witnesses something so traumatic that she cannot remember what she sees; she only knows that whatever it was means that something has happened to Robert.  Her frantic requests at the police station do not, in her opinion, yield much response, particularly after Robert’s wife confirms to the police that he is alive and well, and so she ramps it up by telling them that Robert raped her, providing vivid details that correspond to the book’s prologue scene.  Naomi reasons that if the police think Robert is a danger to others, they will work harder to find him. 

The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of Naomi and  Hannah’s two recurring detectives, DS Charlie Zailer and  DC Simon Waterhouse.  It is Waterhouse who first suspects that neither Naomi nor Robert’s wife are telling the truth and he drags a reluctant Zailer back early from her holiday to investigate what is clearly becoming a much larger crime.  Naomi’s chapters carry a psychological edge to them; Hannah does a good job of giving her a character the voice of a woman who is increasingly unhinged.

Under the Harrow by first-time novelist Flynn Berry deviates from the aforementioned pattern in that the story is told from only one point of view – which becomes a significant factor in the story – and while the chronology is fairly straightforward, there are a number of flashbacks. Told through the eyes of Nora, the story opens as she travels from her home in London to her sister Rachel’s house in the countryside of Oxfordshire.  As she sits on the train, she thinks in anticipation about what Rachel is doing, the meal she is preparing for the two of them, the fun and confidences that they will share over the weekend.  Nora is not particularly surprised when Rachel does not meet her at the station, but she knows immediately that something is wrong when she enters the house.  The dog is hanging by its leash from a banister and Rachel is covered in blood on the landing.  Nora is devastated; flashback memories throughout the novel establish that Rachel was Nora’s best friend and only real family member and that the two sisters have taken many trips together over the years, a second outing to Cornwall planned for the near future. 

Nora, unable to leave the murder investigation in the hands of the local detectives, decides to stay and conduct her own, managing to alienate most of the people with whom she comes in contact.  She fixates on a local repair man to the point that has to get a restraining order.  Nora also suspects the unidentified man who attacked her sister when they were teenagers, a theory that seems a bit far-fetched to the reader until Nora discovers that her sister purchased her dog as a guard dog and that she was planning to move several hours away, a contract already in the works.

As important as the revelation of Rachel’s killer are the discoveries that Nora makes about her sister – someone she thought she knew intimately – which, in turn, lead to new self-understanding for Nora.  This was a good read and an impressive first outing for the author.