This is the first book I've read for the Chunkster Challenge.
This barely qualified as a Chunkster, as I read the large-print edition, which was exactly 525 pages. But oh well! It counts!
Patsy MacLemoore is a young, single history professor with more than a little bit of a drinking problem. When she wakes up in jail one morning, she thinks it's another DWI--which it is, but worse this time: she's hit and killed a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses, a mother and daughter, in her own driveway.
To say that this takes a toll on her own life would be an understatement. There's a prison sentence; there's facing up to her parents, including her father, a currently sober alcoholic himself; there's the impact on her career (the college she teaches at is not a first-rate school, but after prison, she's lucky to have a job at all).
Life after prison is daunting, even with the support of her family and friends. Her probation requires daily AA meetings and has a zero-tolerance alcohol policy. Reuniting with friends she hasn't seen in two years is awkward:
"Patsy was not intentionally quiet. They hadn't found a subject yet. Their old standbys, departmental gossip and men, were not serving them. Why Brice wouldn't spend the night or when exactly Sarah's long-distance lover Dan took up with someone else had been yearlong conversations. Patsy had no man to talk about now and, with Henry, Sarah's whole life had fallen into place with a resounding thunk, all tendrils of dissatisfaction shorn clean off."
Huneven follows Patsy's life for more than 20 years after the deaths of the mother and daughter. In time, Patsy meets the father and son left behind and forges a cautious relationship with them. She works at her sobriety, navigates a world so different than the one she knew before prison, and eventually marries an older man, also a sober alcoholic, and together the two of them become something of a power couple in the AA world.
If this sounds trite, it's because a summary doesn't do the story justice. Huneven shows with painful clarity how this one event changes forever the trajectory of Patsy's life. She can never forget about what happened, and her more-or-less conscious goal is to do something good in life, even though she knows she can never quite balance out the deaths. Her marriage, while comfortable, is not the blissful, romantic relationship she'd hoped for, yet when the opportunity to leave him for a more thrilling relationship arrives, she holds steady, unwilling to cause any more pain.
Patsy's no martyr. She doesn't elevate her own suffering above that of anyone else. She is, above all, very human and realistic. And when late in the book, there's a new development, it shakes her to her core.
SPOILER ALERT
I feel like I can't really review this book without talking about this event. Actually, there are two events, and I'll do a spoiler on only one of them.
More than 20 years after the accident, Patsy learns that she may have not been the one driving the car that night. A man she picked up at a hotel bar might have been behind the wheel and responsible for the deaths.
In some ways, this isn't much of a spoiler, since the jacket copy hints at this, and it's foreshadowed throughout the text (Patsy was in a blackout state and doesn't remember the actual accident). Although in many ways this is good news, it can't undo what 20 years has already done. The years she's spent traveling from meeting to meeting, being interviewed in the press to educate the public about the dangers of drunk driving, appear in an entirely different light. Her marriage, already strained by the arrival of her husband's adult daughter and family to live with them, becomes even more tenuous as her husband refuses to absolve her of responsibility; from his point of view, the fact that she'd been drinking that night is still a direct cause. Patsy has spent most of her adult life defining herself through the prism of that night; now she has to redefine herself in light of what didn't happen.
Huneven's book was an engaging read. At times I felt there was too much "tell" instead of "show." But I felt her instincts about people were strong, and she handled what could have been trite events with a sure hand, veering away from cliche and sentimentality every time.
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Posted by: wHGWEN | February 19, 2010 at 07:07 AM