Jonathan Raban on the Entwistle murders

Jonathan Raban's latest essay for the London Review of Books begins with intentionally banality before lurching in a reader-startling direction: "As Barack Obama never tires of saying, America is a country where 'ordinary people can do extraordinary things.' In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York, who had been living in the U.S. for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian … "

Many Bostonians, of course, avidly followed the various twists following the discovery of the bodies in the Entwistle's house in Hopkinton: Neil's odd flight to England, then the investigation, followed by his extradition, trial, and conviction in June.

Raban's contribution is to cast Entwistle as a product of some strange mashup of Internet culture, English class anxiety, and an American need to keep up materialistic appearances.

"The global theatre of the internet, on whose enormous stage anonymous actors experiment with personae, using whimsical screen-names and avatars that can be changed from moment to moment, is a haven for the insecure," Raban writes -- and Entwistle was massively insecure about his working-class background, although he attended the middle-class-or-better University of York.

At York, Entwistle "lived large on his computer, registering a string of .co.uk enterprises," but the businesses were all marked by "imitative banality. He appears to have trawled for inspiration through the lower reaches of his spam cache, and the language of the sites is not that of a graduate but of a none-too-bright 12-year-old." These hapless efforts to make money continued in America, before he pulled the plug on them and started looking online for sex instead.

His American wife, "heard England in Entwistle's voice" when she met him as a student at York, visiting from Holy Cross: "No wonder he saw her as 'the most amazing woman in the world': she was probably the first girl he’d ever met who didn’t immediately place him by his accent." He was class-conscious, she was class-blind, yet upon arriving in Massachusetts they embarked on the ur-American enterprise of ignoring their actual finances in pursuit of the appearance of affluence: A BMW X3 they couldn't afford was just the beginning.

The American media, writes Raban, missed many of the class elements of the story, misinterpreting, he claims, the conduct of Entwistle's English family, who came here for the trial. (Raban, an English transplant who now lives in Seattle, as I recall, attended it, too.) Reporters "found the entire family spooky and 'psychotic' in their apparent absence of emotion, but what I saw was four old-fashioned people from northern England, trying to put their best face on the unspeakable, in a show of grimly punctilious deference and good manners." Which is not to say that Raban does not find Neil Entwistle himself spooky, in a distinctively modern, distinctively English, modality.