Common Points of Pain

By Walter Kirn

Love triangles are a dime a dozen in novels, but hate triangles are altogether rarer. In John Burnham Schwartz's swift, smooth second novel, Reservation Road (Knopf; 292 pages; $24), the three-sided relationship between Ethan Learner, a pacifist English professor; his wife Grace, a trusting garden designer; and Dwight Arno, a temperamental probate lawyer, converges on a common point of pain: the hit-and-run death of 10-year-old Josh Learner, Ethan and Grace's music-prodigy son, at the cold steel hands of Dwight's Ford Taurus. The death is an accident, all blood and vectors, but the dark, emotional dance that follows is shown to be as inevitable as fate.

Part hardboiled thriller, part sensitive melodrama, with tears for the ladies and gunplay for the guys, the novel borrows a potent narrative trick from Kenneth Fearing's noir classic, The Big Clock: Schwartz tells the story from complementary viewpoints that must sooner or later collide and clash. In their grief and remorse, the three lead characters start out locked in separate universes. Ethan, insulated in his study, ceaselessly revisits happier days while simultaneously dreaming of revenge, despite a father who drilled him in nonviolence. Grace drifts in an existential darkness amid her bright perennials, her spirit crisping and withering leaf by leaf. And Dwight, by far the most interesting of the three, is spellbound by the spectacle of his own guilt. No saint (he has knocked his wife down and clobbered his son), he can't quite see himself as a killer either.

Culpability, like loss, takes a while to absorb. As the parents, who turn out to be his neighbors, grieve, Dwight goes about his business with a sinking feeling, getting used to the role of villain in a script he can't remember writing. "Between the dense, mounded pectoral muscles there was the breastbone, thin and brittle, and I put my thumb against it, on the spot where the right front of my car would have hit his boy..."

Ethan too has trouble learning his part as a bereft father. He doesn't know which to give the upper hand to--sadness or anger--and whether it's more manly to suffer in silence, drink in hand, or rage out loud, with his finger on a trigger. "This was the fatal habit of Polonius: to stand in the shadows, listening, peering at life with half an eye, letting others take the risk of living and despising them for it."

The dilemma is made a bit too sharp and pat by Ethan's peace-loving intellectual heritage, but Schwartz stays close enough to his characters' thoughts to keep the debate authentic and personal, rather than calculated and abstract.

Grace is the only one of the principals who isn't allowed to speak in her own voice. She's watched and observed but never fully pried open. It seems like an arbitrary choice at first, but as the novel progresses, it makes sense: Schwartz is putting a kind of disciplined distance between himself and a mourning middle-aged mother whose anguish may be too raw and primal for a male writer to understand. In the meantime, the two men circle each other, nearer and nearer, meeting by happenstance, then by design. At first it is only Dwight, the perpetrator, who understands what links the three of them. His crime makes him all-knowing, a sort of God. That's the dark truth at the center of Schwartz's story: the guilty see all too clearly, all too starkly, what the innocent can only guess at.

--By Walter Kirn