the bright forever

The opening chapter of this book ends: "I warn you: this is a story as hard to hear as it is for me to tell" and that's the truth. The "me" telling the story changes by chapter, but by the time you're four or five deep (they're only 3 or 4 pages each) you know whose speaking without the benefit of markers. Certain dates get narrated by an omniscient narrator, who sounds most like Mr. Dees, who is the first narrator the reader meets and arguably the "main" character. Although that might ultimately be a matter of timing, every character is convincingly flushed out spread eagle in their few pages throughout the novel.

The central event of the novel is the disappearance of a young girl, who is dramatically, universally beloved by everyone - even those who don't know it yet - in her fictional Indiana town. The novel slowly unfolds, unraveling the mystery of what happened to the little girl and at the hands of whom. A third of the way in, the action takes a back seat to the character development. The slow unfolding of the pathos just under the surface of every character: rich, poor, happy, sad, male, female, young and old.

In the end, it is our secrets that both hold us together and send us into spontaneous combustion - a slow building, eventual spontaneous combustion. It's not a new idea, but it's successfully executed until the final thirty pages. Maybe it's because I read it all in one sitting and the sad might have gotten to be too much or the drama to intense, but it just kind of lost me. The dignity of the characters began to seep away, they moved from unsympathetic, real people to something else.

Maybe it's the central event - the disappearance and misuse of a child is not something most people can gloss over at the end and no matter how convincingly culpability gets spread among "everyman" in the novel. And maybe it's the direct, calculated way that point is made in the final pages. However, at the end of the day, some of us are more culpable than others and some acts of cowardice, or even non-acts, are just as violent as the ones executed by those who are armed. More importantly, they might be harder to forgive.