Broken River

In a scene near the end, one of the principal characters, a writer, receives feedback from her agent on her just-completed manuscript: “Why don't you tell me,” [the agent] goes on “what your thoughts are on this book. Where you wanted to take it. Where it actually went.” There's a lot of meta packed into this book — some of it effective, some less so — this one elicited a grin. I'm convinced Lennon must've had a similar conversation with his own agent.

This is a tough book to categorize. I see that Goodreads sorts it into Crime/Thriller/Mystery/Horror, and I can sort of understand that, but it's really much more than that: I would file it under Relationships, or Explorations of the Narcissistic Psyche, or Existential Angst, or a handful of other imaginary genre bins. For me, minor spoiler alert, the Observer gimmick didn't work at all. It was quirky in the beginning, got my interest, but did not contribute anything to the story which is itself told in third-person omniscient so we already have an Observer. It felt a little like the Monty Python skit with the documentary crews. Despite that, and despite underdeveloped characters, I quite enjoyed the book. As I said above, there's a lot of meta, but it's subdued, self-aware, playful; not pretentious. The lonelinesses between the characters are each unique, and hot damn, having just written that I remembered another memorable passage from an early chapter, on a fascination for negative spaces. I think Lennon was deliberately aiming at loneliness, miscommunication, the difficulty of connecting with others. That negative-space paragraph was a huge hint, and I didn't get it until just now. I wonder what else I missed?

Another book I found on a “Best of” list which almost lived up to the hype. Starting with a double murder described in engaging prose, this novel drew me in and kept my attention throughout. The story has a fair amount of suspense, but it didn't turn into a “page turner” for me until near the end. What interested me was the description of the artistically minded family falling apart as they try to build a life in Upstate New York. Each of the family members is struggling to connect with the others and this builds as much tension as the way that the murder from the past increasingly weighs on the present.

The most curious character and the one who elevates this novel from a pure murder mystery into something deeper is the mysterious Observer. Acting as a type of omniscient narrator, this being hovers over the human characters' interactions. While some readers might find this narrative devise odd or even hokey, I think it adds layers to an otherwise run of the mill tale. Certainly a good choice for the “beach reading” genre.