Nick, Carmon’s brother and one of the car’s passengers the night of the accident, is a gifted astronomer who atones for the tragedy with annual visits to the dead girl’s mother but who also succumbs to the pull of drugs and alcohol. The social road ahead looked like a bleak highway, post-apocalyptic, overblown with dust, gray and lifeless except for mutants popping up here and there”. When Carmon, the now-divorced bride, takes a night course on Proust and meets a man she initially rejects, “she knew she signed up for the class mostly to meet someone, but that someone was not Rob. There is no such thing as relief”.Ĭarol Anshaw’s writing is eloquent as well as humorous, and is a major part of the book’s enjoyment. They don’t transcend the past so much as wish they could erase it. As one critic put it, “These characters are no wiser for having endured the accident. This novel is not about mushy feel-good transformation and redemption.
The driver and her passengers, as well as the guilt-ridden bride and groom who were not in the car, spend the next 25 years grappling with the consequences of their negligence.
The drugged driver hits and kills a 10-year-old girl who suddenly appears on the darkened road. What happens when, in a split second, life as you know it is altered irrevocably by a tragic event? How do you find a way to slot the painful memory into some sort of mental cubbyhole that will allow you to carry on and move forward with your life? Carry the One opens in 1983 with a wedding in which the main characters in the novel consume many intoxicating substances over the course of a long evening, and then climb into a car to head home.
0 kommentar(er)
