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PARTISAN REVIEW
in a beloved child?
Brown attempts to deal with these unnerving questions by dividing
the narrative among three voices, those of Ben, Carolyn, and Judith,
each offering different points of view about Jacob and the murder. But
the boy is not heard directly, as though to emphasize his stark and terri–
ble difference from the others. He clings to his sullen, disquieting silence,
shattering the nerves of his parents and sister, until, home on bail and
awaiting trial, he tearfully blurts out his version of that fateful night; but
his parents know it is less than the truth. Each of them is determined to
make different use of the truth they've grasped, and their irreconcilable
decisions splinter the family more gravely than ever. Ben insists, "I had no
illusions. But he was my son, and my love is not provisional upon his ac–
tions or his goodness," and he refuses to testify against Jacob. Carolyn,
the last of the true believers in justice, and haunted by the indelible
memory of the girl's bloody skull, tells the court the truth. Yet the trial
ends in a hung jury, setting Jacob free.
Unfortunately, as the antagonistic moralities clash, Brown's dramatic
scheme becomes too schematic and contrived. The father's unconditional
support for his son, which he dubiously regards as a form of forgiveness,
is asserted over and over again, but it is never credibly demonstrated. The
mother's uncompromising intransigence seems equally implausible. Only
twelve-year-old Judith is allowed to speak words of wisdom instead of
the exclamatory shallowness assigned to her parents, for Judith alone
seems to have any awareness of the reality of evil: "I mean, aren't there
people who are just plain not nice?"
In the end we are left with only an ambiguous and irresolute sense
of the irreparable damage that the murder has done to all the Reisers,
and a mawkish finale merely papers over the cracks, moral and psycho–
logical, that Brown has failed to confront. We don't encounter the
decisive, probing intelligence this novelist brought to an earlier book,
Civil Wars,
about the post-partum depression of civil-rights militants
bereft of their causes by history. Reading
Before and After,
with its con–
siderable wealth of acute observation and social detail, we can't help
feeling cheated by the equivocal ending that Brown settles for, rather
than a hard-won quest for an answer to her terrible question, "If your
son was a killer, what would you do?"
There is nothing irresolute about John Updike's literary imagination
and the nimble ingenuities displayed in the fifteen novels he has published
to date. He writes, with unfailing predictability, in perfectly poised con–
trol of mind, prose, character, and place - the place more often than
not being the bedroom. But although sexual permutations and combi-
