As a follow-up to John Burnham Schwartz's last book, the well-received "Reservation Road," "Northwest Corner" is, appropriately enough, a novel about fallout -- about patching together a new life from pieces of the old failed one, and perhaps finding redemption. As one character puts it: "It's so easy to get swallowed up by the life you never expected to have."
This is precisely what's happened to the fractured family in the new novel, especially Dwight, father and ex-husband, whose crime haunts the story: a hit-and-run accident in which, while driving home from a ballgame with his 10-year-old son Sam, he killed another 10-year-old boy. Finally he gave himself up, served a 30-month prison sentence, moved to California and started a new, diminished life.
Twelve years have passed when "Northwest Corner" begins, but for each member of the family -- and for the dead boy's sister, Emma -- life is still about surviving the past, salvaging something. Then the past and its repercussions become very much present, unavoidable, with the violent act that sets this novel's plot in motion. Dwight's son, Sam, is now a 20-year-old student and baseball player at UConn. At a bar after a bad performance on the field, he is goaded by a drunken punk and explodes, gut-whacking -- and grievously injuring -- the guy with his bat.
Sam flees to California, to find his estranged father -- and to try to come to terms with what he's done, even as he finally comes to terms with his father's guilt. As he later explains it to Emma, his peer and fellow sufferer: "What he needs to do is draw from the acid pool of self-recrimination a portrait of his own flawed conscience, a drawing intended to posit that, according to some moral proof of his own reckoning, inside the heart of his violent mistake must live the real person."
As the novel proceeds -- alternating between the perspectives of Dwight, Sam, Emma, Sam's mother and Dwight's new love interest -- we see each character struggling with the nature and meaning of Sam's violent act, especially as it reflects that earlier moment of violence that shattered their world. Paradoxically, Sam's violence forces the family together again, as each, however uneasily or unwillingly, requires the others' perspectives in order to puzzle out the whole story and proceed.
Schwartz does this with a quiet artfulness, giving each character a unique and uniquely moving voice embedded within a consistently interesting and graceful prose -- and creating a structure and style that neatly reflect the story they frame, of piecing together a whole life that is at once the sum of its parts and much more.
Ellen Akins is a writer in Cornucopia, Wis.
