See How Small is not a happy book. It is a story of misery in small-town USA, shared among many narrators.  The start of the novel sets out the main tragedy: three teen girls are violated, killed, and burned in a fire in an ice-cream shop.  The proliferation of different perspectives documents how people affected have their lives ruined by this crime, and their lives were dried and hollow even before the murders.  They do what people do, with romance, children, and work but there seems to be no joy in their existence. What’s more, the tone of the book is unrelenting, and there’s no relief or catharsis at the end. Instead, there are periodic moments of horror where people do awful things or have experience terrible losses. People are isolated, either on their own, or else spending their time with others without communicating.  They are weighed down by the past and often perpetuate their own unhappiness or else make others unhappy. 

This is Blackwood’s first book and it is very accomplished in bringing together so many voices, and keeping an even tone. Most of the 60 chapters are short, occasionally only a few lines. They end suddenly.  Thankfully, it is a short work: the unabridged audiobook is only 4 hours 4 minutes, and the hardcover is 224 pages.  By the time it is done, we don’t really have a good idea about how the murder came about but we do see how people’s hopes to achieve love and fulfillment are doomed, and they are almost certainly to be damaged by their journey through life.

The book is technically impressive and it has won praise. The unabridged audiobook, performed by Rengin Altay, is also done well.  There isn’t much variation in tone and that makes it harder to be clear on the shift of narrator from chapter to chapter, but then the book doesn’t give much announcement of that either.  The text and the audiobook both let the unfurling awfulness creep up on the reader and envelop them.  There’s complexity in See How Small, and does justice to the horror or the real life event that inspired it, but it is hardly a rich view of life that Blackwood delivers.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York