A suspense story, the initial setting is a lush Caribbean island called Saint X. Anyone who’s been on an island vacation will recognize the resort ambience, the predictable tourist activities, the hospitality of the obliging staff. And the glimpses of typical island life beyond its accommodation of first-world privilege. Beautiful eighteen-year-old golden girl Alison Thomas goes missing on the last night of their family holiday; her body is found a few days later in a waterfall pool on an uninhabited offshore cay. Her parents, and especially her little sister Claire, are affected for life. Their instincts go immediately to foul play; they, and local gossip, believe two resort employees, Edwin and Clive, were involved. But the police find no evidence to implicate anyone. Publicity about the mystery goes far and wide.
Years later Claire—now called Emily―is in her thirties, working in New York. Old audio tapes—a spoken diary―made by Alison before the family holiday ever took place, do not satisfy Emily’s wish to uncover whatever secrets her adored sister might have had. And most of all, what would Alison be like today, had she lived? An encounter with Clive, a transplanted city taxi driver, hardens an obsession to find the truth of what happened on that long ago final night. She stalks him. The narrative shifts between them, with brilliant little inserts from various witnesses of the time. Sometimes we hear from Alison herself. Schaitkin perfectly evokes island village life in description and dialect, as well as Emily’s growing cognitive dissonance—a sensation the sisters might have shared. These human beings evolve in an atmospheric, contemplative journey.
Claire/Emily
▪ We see so little of people. We forget how much submerged darkness there is around us at every moment. (91)
▪ “I’ve been finding it really therapeutic lately to hear stories from people who knew her.” (105)
▪ The diary was a slippery thing, weaving together confession with self-delusion, truth with distortion. (188)
▪ It no longer felt like I was following him, but like we were on this walk together, linked. Eventually, even this we faded away; it was no longer the two of us traveling these dark streets, but a single mind, a memory, endeavoring through the step, step, step of these constitutionals to travel beyond some perimeter it could never seem to reach. (145)
▪ You can see how a diary might become a useful tool, how it might be used to rewrite history, to recast the pivotal moments of one’s life to suggest a humbler, more critical self. (187)
▪ What I can’t figure out: Was Alison insufferable in a perfectly ordinary teenage way, or was something darker at play? Was her behavior typical or troubling? What destiny lay ahead of her as she toyed with the blond boy and danced at Paulette’s Place and swam out beyond the black rocks in the rain-swelled surf? Who was she? (218)
Clive
▪ Edwin and me have been breds since second grade. I know his mind and how it turns. He likes them with some twist to their pretty. He picks her then. I know even before he. (291)
▪ When she asks what we’re doing here, Edwin takes a spliff out of he pocket, twirls it in he finger, and says, “Nothing much.” (296)
▪ Because of Edwin he’d lost everything, but without him, he would not even have had these things to lose. (316)
Alison
▪ I mean, how did everybody totally miss what actually happened tonight? I didn’t make a single mistake, not one, and I still completely failed. (182)
▪ You know how sometimes the world just rips open and you find yourself in a moment that is totally sacred? (189)
▪ What you want is a guy who is a little afraid of you. And you want to be a little afraid of him, too. (202)
▪ Maybe she simply wants to give herself her wildest wild night; proof, to some older, duller version of herself, that she was young once and didn’t squander it. (323)
Others
▪ The family vacations at a different resort on a different island every winter, weeklong respites from their snowbound suburb that steel them for the remaining months of darkness and cold. They have seen palm trees bent to kiss the sand. They have seen water as pale as glaciers and walked on sand as soft as cream. They have watched the sun transform, at the end of the day, into a giant orange yolk that breaks and spills itself across the sea. They have seen the night sky overcome with fine blue stars. (7)
▪ He likes to think he wears his affluence tastefully. He does not move through the world expecting things to be perfect. He tries to like everything and everybody as much as he can. (14)
▪ What a relief to find, in middle age, that there are still interests waiting inside you to be discovered, that you just might have more artistic heft than you long ago made your peace with having. (20)
▪ Alison’s death is a mystery like God or Stonehenge or intelligent life in the universe—if you aren’t careful, that shit will consume you, and in the end you’ll still be no closer to solving it.
Julia Alvarez. Afterlife. (Ebook download from TPL) USA: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020.
First time reading Alvarez; lively, lovely book. How things often go at random for me: this novel, like the last (Saint X), is also about biological sisterhood; its protagonista* also struggles with loss of a beloved and how not to lose the essence of that person. The narrator is Antonia, one of four sisters whose parents immigrated with them when youngsters. Widowed recently, Antonia fiercely misses husband Sam, just when she’s retiring from teaching English at a Vermont college. Although her sisters say she lives in “a wordsmithing world,” and they are all Americans, their Dominican Republic roots and Spanish language are never far below the surface. Izzy, the eldest, and Mona have become therapists. I’ve forgotten(!) if Tilly had a profession. Two major events beset Antonia soon after we meet her. One is being sucked into the catch-22 of undocumented local farm workers. The second is the disappearance of sister Izzy. Tolstoy’s promulgated Three Questions are prompting Antonia’s reactions.
Izzy was to meet the sisters at Tilly’s in Illinois for Antonia’s birthday party; Izzy has a crazed personal history despite her professional accreditation. Somewhere en route she goes missing. The remaining sisterhood goes into full-blown Latina hysterics involving much commotion with police and a hospital and a truckload of llamas. Meanwhile, Antonia is self-compelled (what would Sam do?) to protect Mario, a Mexican labourer, and his pregnant girlfriend, from the dread immigration police. Antonia nearly always has a literary quote to sustain herself and keep Sam alive in her mind. What a trip!—social issues and personal antics balanced with fine humour. The world needs more of Alvarez.
* I was wishing I’d invented that, but it’s a real word.
Teasers
▪ She, the reluctant activist, though everyone assumed it was she who was the political one by virtue of her ethnicity, as if being Latina automatically conferred a certain radical stance. (38-9)
▪ Literature has to pull its weight in the real world or else it’s of no use to us. (42)
▪ Unlike Sam, who can enjoy his afterlife roaming through her head, Antonia will not have Sam to keep her alive in his imagination. (75)
▪ Her sisters are doing what they always do when they depart a scene, parsing the meat off its bones, analyzing, judging, exclaiming over the different personalities, a kind of sisterhood digestive system. (117)
▪ Sam often noted that Antonia got a lot bossier in Spanish. (146)
▪ She has continued to think a lot about the afterlife, especially in the absence of any sign from Sam. What, if anything, does it mean? An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. (154)
▪ Izzy, pobrecita, with her runaway mind. No root system for that larger-than-life spirit. (218)
▪ The problem with having sisters who are therapists, Antonia has often noted, is that you get all kinds of diagnoses thrown at you that you can’t defend yourself against. (246)
▪ Love wins the day. The sisters lurch forward to hug her, cheerleaders whose down-on-their-luck team has finally won a game. (263)
▪ As if the fragile world has not been informed of its imminent demise, the summer unfolds. (296)
Michael Connelly. Fair Warning. USA: Little, Brown and Company, 2020.
Jack McEvoy’s journalism career has taken him through standard newspaper reporting to a media website called Fair Warning; its mission is consumer protection against various levels of malfeasance and corruption. Two LAPD homicide detectives inform Jack he’s a person of interest when the woman with whom he had a one-night stand has been brutally murdered. His DNA will clear him—when the results come back. But Jack senses a story. Cause of death was atlanto-occipital-dislocation (AOD), a rare and particular type of broken neck. He discovers three more women who were killed the same way. They all had registered with a “heritage analysis” outfit called GT23.* The company is an example of the tremendously popular family history interest in submitting your DNA for matching.
Jack’s boss Myron is reluctant to pursue a homicide story but it grows a life, revolving around DNA companies, laboratories, and their use of DNA data—which submitters expect to remain anonymous. We are witness to journalistic steps of a “Breaking!” in the making. From the trust of would-be genealogists to analytics research to a misogynist incel hacker and a high-tech psychopathic killer is a scary scenario. There is no government oversight for re-sale of genetic data. Who is to say if unregulated labs could be prey to aberrations as described here, or if breaches have already happened? Reporter Emily at Fair Warning is co-opted to help as the story mushrooms, and Jack’s estranged love, Rachel, formerly of the FBI, is keen to assist as more deaths are found in other parts of the country. They are so busy, it’s a toss-up whether the romance will re-kindle. Classic Connelly with more twists than a helix.
* Awfully close to real life 23andMe!
One-liners
▪ I was talking about her daughter being stalked and she fixated on her daughter’s drug and alcohol issues. (52)
▪ There was such a stigma attached to suicide that most newspapers avoided it like the plague. (63)
▪ “Jack, I didn’t come because I need your apology.” (59)
▪ It was a reference to something she had told me years before: that she believed everybody had somebody out there in the world who could pierce their heart like a bullet. (159)
▪ “He was telling his customers exactly who they were and where to find them.” (239)
▪ “What we did was no different from any dating service out there,” he said. (324)
Multi-Liners
▪ “We are conducting a murder investigation and the last thing we need is a couple of half-assed reporters poking around and screwing things up. Stand. Down.” (45)
▪ There it was. Four for four. Four AOD deaths, four victims who had turned their DNA over to GT23. (71)
▪ For the first time in a long time I had a story that had my blood moving with an addictive momentum. It was good to have that feeling back. (93)
▪ To me there had never been any doubt. Rachel was the one. Her name was on the bullet that pierced me. (160)
▪ “Short Tandem Repeat analysis is the evaluation of specific loci,” he said. “This is where we hunt. Where we look for the commonalities in identity, behavior, hereditary attributes.” (184)
Convince the boss:
“What story, Jack? We are a consumer watchdog, not the L.A. Times murder blog.”
“The story is not the murder. I mean, it is, but the real story is the cyberstalking and that gets us into the arena of consumer protection. Everybody has social media. This is a story about how vulnerable we are to cyber predators. How privacy is a thing of the past.” (42)
Foiled the cops:
Myron and I watched through the window as they swaggered through the newsroom toward the door. I felt good. I felt supported and protected. It was not a good time to be a journalist. It was the era of fake news and reporters being labeled by those in power as enemies of the people. Newspapers were folding right and left and some said the industry was in a death spiral. Meanwhile, there was a rise in biased and unchecked reporting and media sites, the line increasingly blurring between impartial and agenda-based journalism. (46-7)
Concerned scientist:
“There are so many directions to go with genetic research. It’s really in its infancy. And we—meaning the company―don’t control what happens with the bio and how it’s used once it goes out the door. That’s the FDA’s problem, not ours—that was the attitude. And let me tell you, the FDA didn’t do jack.”
“Okay, I get that and I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but wasn’t there the safety that it was all anonymous? I mean, these researchers were given the DNA but not the identities of the participants, right?”
“Of course, but that’s not the point. You’re thinking in the present. What about the future? This science is very young. We haven’t even had the whole genome for twenty years. New things are discovered about it every day. Will what is anonymous now stay that way in twenty years? In ten years? Or will usernames and passwords not matter? What if your DNA is your identifier and you’ve already given it away?” (106-7)
No comments:
Post a Comment