Burdens behind a mysterious death, an imminent birth
No One You Know
By Michelle Richmond
Delacorte, 306 pp., $23
How Far Is the Ocean From Here
By Amy Shearn
Shaye Areheart, 320 pp., $23
The Wednesday Sisters By Meg Waite Clayton
Ballantine, 304 pp., $23
An Absolute Scandal By Penny Vincenzi
Doubleday, 575 pp., $24.95
The first two of these four novels are thoughtful, involving, intricately constructed, and well written. The third is an interesting disappointment, the fourth an old-fashioned page-turner by a best-selling author.
Michelle Richmond never strikes a false note in "No One You Know," her third novel. It's an intelligent, emotionally convincing tale about a family tragedy and the process of storytelling. In 1989 narrator Ellie Enderlin's older sister, Lila, a PhD candidate in pure mathematics at Stanford, was murdered. No one was arrested for the crime. In the months after Lila's death, Ellie confided in Andrew Thorpe, her English professor and friend, who, despite her protests, used their conversations as the basis for a best-selling true-crime book about Lila's murder. Andrew's book was a second devastating blow to the Enderlin family. It also destroyed the life of the man Andrew named as Lila's killer, her married lover and Stanford colleague Peter McConnell.
Twenty years later in a remote Nicaraguan village, Ellie, now a coffee buyer, meets Peter, who lives there, self-exiled, working as a contractor for a construction company. Ellie comes away from their conversation convinced that Peter could not have murdered her sister. When she returns to San Francisco she seeks out Andrew, whose career as a crime writer is foundering. Gradually she persuades him to tell her about leads that he abandoned because they did not suit his theory about Lila's murder. Ellie's search for the truth leads her down some blind alleys, but at each turn she gains confidence and comes to a new understanding of her lost sister.
Amy Shearn has assembled a cast of oddballs in her first novel, "How Far Is the Ocean From Here." Bookstore clerk Susannah Prue - love-starved, self-loathing, "hugely pregnant," extremely confused - is on the run from Julian and Kit Forsythe, the wealthy married couple who have hired her to have their baby. She is headed to California, to see the ocean, when her car gives out and she ends up at the Thunder Lodge, a run-down motel near the Texas-New Mexico border. The proprietors, Marlon and Char, are fiercely protective of their handsome, mentally challenged, sex-obsessed 17-year-old son, Tim. Another motel guest, a young woman named Dicey, is taking her 7-year-old niece, Frankie, to California, to live with her father, whom she has never met. Frankie is a hermaphrodite who is being raised as a girl and is not happy about it.
Susannah paddles in the Grotto, the motel's small "aggressively chlorinated" swimming pool, flirts mildly with Tim, and, gripped by melancholy, chews over her many disappointments. She thought becoming a surrogate would make her feel like a free spirit. Instead she feels like "just another satellite drawn to the orbit of the Forsythes' marriage, sucked in by the gravitational pull of their money." Shearn's narrative shifts among several characters. She clearly has affection for all her creations, endowing each one with a convincingly flawed humanity.
There's nothing subtle about "The Wednesday Sisters," Meg Waite Clayton's formulaic story of lasting female friendship in a time of enormous societal change. It begins with five young women meeting in a Palo Alto, Calif., park in the late 1960s. They're all intelligent and well educated, and defined by their roles as wives and mothers. They share their opinions and experiences, talk about books, and form a writing group, the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society. The major events of the time - Robert Kennedy's assassination, the moon landing, the women's movement, the Vietnam War - unfold in the background as the five women grow and change while dealing with illness, infidelity, infertility, racism. "The Wednesday Sisters" points up how much women's roles, expectations, and opportunities have changed in the last 40 years. It's bound to provide a lot of fodder and inspiration for book-club discussions. Unfortunately it's not a well-executed novel. The characterizations are superficial, the writing is pedestrian, the plot lines are mawkish.
British writer Penny Vincenzi cranks out one best-selling page-turner after another. "An Absolute Scandal," her latest, is set in the 1980s, the "Greed Decade," when Lloyd's, the great British insurance market, posted unprecedented losses. "An Absolute Scandal" follows the misfortunes of some of the "Names," as Lloyd's financial backers are called, who lost enormous sums of money. Insurance isn't a sexy subject, but Vincenzi works hard to keep things interesting, weaving together the stories of so many characters that a list is provided at the start of the novel. Many of the major characters are complacently wealthy and not very sympathetic. But there are middle-class types, too: a young widowed single mother, a schoolteacher. There are suicide, infidelity, bankruptcy, divorce, and oceans of tears, regrets, and recriminations. Some of the story lines have a truncated quality, and some endings are improbable. This is not one of Vincenzi's best novels, but it's diverting, mindless summer reading.
Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.
