I love reviewing books but sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I Love Lucy episode at the chocolate factory. The conveyer belt speeds up and the books keep coming along faster than they can be "wrapped" in a review. Summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring.
James Lasdun's The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh came out the first week of May, which is when I read it. This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lasdun wrote for The New Yorker, is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 murders of his wife and adult son.
Then came the real-life plot twist: A little over a week after Lasdun's book was published, Murdaugh's conviction was overturned because of jury tampering. A retrial is being scheduled. Rather than rendering The Family Man obsolete, this new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdaugh case — including suspicious deaths and embezzlement.
Lasdun is a "true crime" writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative, Lasdun is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery: the mystery of evil.
Harriet Clark's debut novel, The Hill, which came out in May, has been getting tons of deserved praise. The novel draws explicitly from Clark's own background: Born in 1980, Clark was 11 months old when her mother, a member of the radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men. Clark's maternal grandparents got custody and she visited her mother in prison for almost 40 years, before she was paroled in 2019.
Clark's main character, Suzanna, is 8 when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party. The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis. Every week, Suzanna is taken — first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then on her own — to visit her mother at the Children's Center in Hillcrest prison. Suzanna's voice charges this novel with intelligence:
Each week ... my mother fixed and re-fixed my hair. I slept and didn’t sleep, . ... Around us women counted down to release, but my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward, no interest in looking back, we were, as I saw it, free of the past and free of the future. Carnival Day, Friendship Day, Birthday Day — the holidays in the Center followed their own lilting rhythms, and eventually we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life.
All the while I was reading The Hill, I kept thinking of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels differ in scope, but like Doctorow, Clark interrogates the cost of parents' radical commitment to their children, as well as how the world itself shifts radically, from generation to generation.
Sometimes I put aside a good book for a bad reason. Mary Costello's slim novel, A Beautiful Loan, touted as a devastating story about relationships, came out in March. "No," I thought back then, "not another ersatz Sally Rooney in time for St. Patrick's Day."
But, one empty afternoon, I picked it up and kept reading, mostly because the present-tense narration of the main character, Anna, struck me as so weird in tone. Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence. Here's 19-year-old Anna summarizing how Paul, an elusive older man she'll eventually marry, keeps her in thrall to what she calls "this oscillating life":
In the middle of the night, ... he rises on one elbow in the bed beside me and, in an urgent, desperate voice, says, I love you. In the morning, he makes no reference to this, and I think he must have spoken in his sleep. Never again in our lives together will he say those three words.
A Beautiful Loan spans 25 years and Anna's obsessive devotion to two men, one dog, the writings of Camus and Jung, and the practice of Islam. Like the other two books I've caught up with here, it may not be the ideal "beach read," but it would be perfect for a wash-out of a summer weekend.
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