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Something had been set in motion that could not be reversed.
Reading this novel was a harrowing experience. The complex characters are rendered in such depth, in a multigenerational telescoping of trauma, that I was instantly drawn into profound identifications with each one's point of view. I felt traumatized myself, to the point of nausea, while feeling unable to break the spell, escape the illusion by reminding myself that the created world is, after all, a fictional one. I even caught myself performing acts of “lucid revision”: writing happier fictions and better endings.
The story revolves around five characters. Rose and Margaret are two sisters, in early middle age. Rose has three children — Erin, Damien, and Catherine — while Margaret is a successful and ambitious career woman, child-free by choice.
As with Ogden's first novel (The Parts Left Out, 2014), this one starts with a long-fermenting, multigenerational coup de foudre: a traumatic “accident,” in which the youngest child, 13-year-old Catherine, crashes down a flight of stairs, while her family all witness this, aghast and paralyzed.
Ogden's description of the nuances of bodily and facial expression during the minutes of the fall, and its immediate aftermath, together with his account of their internal dialogues, is masterful. This is the case throughout the novel, but it is marked by a particular intensity throughout the first chapters, in which Ogden describes the traumatic “accident” — or attack? — that sets the narrative in motion. The narrator is third-person and omniscient and captures the time-stopped motions, physical and psychological, of each protagonist and witness. Anyone who has lived through a traumatic event knows how all of one's senses are operating at maximum intensity, and how a witnessing self observes all with an eerie objectivity operating alongside emotions of horror, disbelief. Here is Ogden's account of the dance of gaze and gesture:
Without a sound being uttered, all eyes tur