The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But the death isn't ruled a murder-and might never have been if one of the gang-a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran-hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight.
During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them-and they kill him. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. But Strout demonstrates exceptional poise, and an uncommon ability to render complex emotions with clarity and a sympathetic intelligence, evoking comparisons with the work of Alice Munro and Anne Tyler. In less sure hands, all of this would seem merely melodramatic. Matters come to a head when Amy and her teacher are discovered in compromising circumstances, and when members of her father’s family suddenly get in touch. She also renders a wonderfully nuanced portrait of Isabelle, a bright, often angry woman who has only imperfectly replaced passion with stoicism. She catches, with an admirable restraint, and particularity, Amy’s emergent sense of self, the wild succession of emotions in adolescence, and Amy’s stunning discovery of sex.
Strout nicely interweaves these elements within the record of Amy and Isabelle’s increasingly charged relationship. New elements, however, signal a darker time: UFO’s have been sighted, and a young girl is missing and may have been abducted. Some elements of the life there seem timeless: the steady flow of gossip, the invisible but nonetheless rigid social hierarchies, the ancient disruptions of life (illness, adultery, violence).
Part of the novel’s power derives from Strout’s ability to set Amy and Isabel’s painful struggles within the larger context of a small town. Amy, at 16, has a poised, delicate beauty, and finds herself-at first with alarm, then with a barely suppressed excitement-responding to the flirtations of a new teacher. Now, Amy’s innocence is under assault from various quarters, and her mother finds herself losing touch with the daughter who has been the focus of her existence. Amy has grown up knowing little about her father and, thanks to her closeness to Isabel, also knowing little about the rough give-and-take of life. Isabel Goodrow had settled in the mill town of Shirley Falls when her daughter Amy was an infant, reluctantly admitting to those who asked that both her husband and her parents were dead. A lyrical, closely observant first novel, charting the complex, resilient relationship of a mother and daughter.
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