PEARL K. BELL
65
In the remaining half of the novel, the murderers brood and fret and
mumble. Stupefied by a bottomless supply of Valium, pot and cocaine,
they mouth spurious, high-flown anguish that soon becomes unbearably
boring. But they can't decide whether their actions were evil or just
over-ebullient, and Richard disingenuously declares, "What we did was
terrible, but still I don't think any of us were bad, exactly." Since Tartt's
paper-doll characters are too synthetic to be worth any sympathy, he's
probably right. With all its pretensions to erudition and moral serious–
ness,
The Secret History,
whose author comes from Mississippi, is a speci–
men of Southern Gothic. Like many Southern novelists, Tartt has an un–
deniable talent for evocative descriptions of nature and weather, but the
rest of the story is all designer melodrama and exhibitionist glitz, the
surefire formula for instant stardom, and the Warholian fifteen-minutes'
place in the literary season.
A brutal murder is also at the heart of Rosellen Brown's
Bifore and
After,
and like Tartt's novel, it was an immediate bestseller, with the film
rights quickly snapped up. Beyond this, however, the two novels have
little in common. Brown is an intelligent, thoughtful writer, of poetry
as well as fiction, who is not tempted into pretension. Her new novel is
a domestic tragedy about a family of recognizable human beings whose
normally stable, predictably uneventful life is shattered by an act of willful
savagery.
Ben and Carolyn Reiser, with their twelve-year-old daughter Judith
and seventeen-year-old son Jacob, live in a small New Hampshire town,
where Carolyn is a busy pediatrician and Ben is a sculptor who works at
home and manages the household. At her hospital Carolyn is summoned
one afternoon to examine the body of a young girl bludgeoned to
death in an icy field . Horrified by the gruesomely crushed skull, Carolyn
soon learns that Jacob was entangled with the girl, was seen talking to
her before the body was discovered, and is obviously a strong suspect.
Worse, Jacob has disappeared. When his father, hot-headed and impetu–
ous, realizes how Jacob's absence will be construed by the police, he
rushes out to his son's car, where he finds a bloodied jack and other in–
criminating evidence that he proceeds to destroy.
Despite the melodrama, it is clear from the start that Rosellen
Brown is not manipulating a suspensefully delayed revelation about the
murder but is concerned with the suffering that Jacob's crime inflicts on
his family, and the ethical confusion and terror they are now forced,
painfully, to confront. Relentlessly, Brown circles around some disturb–
ing conundrums: Do parents ever really know their children? Is there any
conceivable way of reconciling the conflicting demands of justice and
family ties? How can a parent cope with the indisputable evidence of evil
