Dianne Dixon’s debut novel is a dark tale about marriage and secrets that promises no happy endings.  The main message seems to be that families hide the truth about what happened in the past, so that each member of the family has a distorted picture of the truth.  No one really knows the full story of the past, and yet they think they do, so they judge each other, often with terrible consequences.  This moral is hung on a rather artificial plot, but it is still a well told story.  Dixon repeatedly shifts the narrative between the 1970s when Justin Fisher was a little boy and the 2000s when he is a successful businessman, and has just moved to California with his wife and child, and between different characters.  Justin has lost contact with his family, and when he returns to the family house, he discovers that the family has moved away.  He locates the nursing home where his father went to live, only to discover that his father died recently.  He visits the grave, where he finds his mother’s gravestone too, and also his own.  It says he died as a child, and this provides the central mystery of the book: why does this gravestone exist?  Going back in time, we see his parents’ unhappy marriage and the pathetically sad childhood he had.  We see how each generation can make the next miserable, and the myriad ways people have of torturing each other in families.  The plot is far from credible, but since this novel is more like a morality tale, the credibility of the central sequence of events is not really the point.  The writing in the novel has plenty of dialog making the book an easy read, even if several of the minor characters are caricatures whose only existence comes from a need to serve the moral of the story.  The performance of the unabridged audiobook by Rebecca Lowman is done well, making the novel especially enjoyable despite its patchy characterization and gloomy outlook.

© 2010 Christian Perring        

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