A beautifully written novella that plays with memory, its unreliability and persistence, and the way one crucial episode on our lives can come back to haunt us.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this would have been three times as long, and unbearably self-indulgent. At 150 pages, it's exactly right: enough to build up the background and personality of Tony Webster, establish the otherwise mundane mystery that comes with an unexpected legacy from the mother of an ex-girlfriend, and delicately unravel the sorry truth that emerges from the solution to that mystery.
I find it interesting that a novel that is about the unreliability of memory, the lies we tell ourselves, and the way we rewrite our lives' narratives, the blurb quoted here is just dead wrong on one important point: when it says that Tony ... contends with a past he has never much thought about .... No, I'd say its pretty clear that he has never stopped thinking about those events in his early twenties, and brooding on them. As I was reading, it occurred to me that this novel has a lot in common with another great story about memory, and the life-shattering effects of an incident in youth -- "The Go-Between." Like that great novel, the past is a foreign country ..., and Tony Webster is only just realizing that he is a foreigner in his own life.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this would have been three times as long, and unbearably self-indulgent. At 150 pages, it's exactly right: enough to build up the background and personality of Tony Webster, establish the otherwise mundane mystery that comes with an unexpected legacy from the mother of an ex-girlfriend, and delicately unravel the sorry truth that emerges from the solution to that mystery.
I find it interesting that a novel that is about the unreliability of memory, the lies we tell ourselves, and the way we rewrite our lives' narratives, the blurb quoted here is just dead wrong on one important point: when it says that Tony ... contends with a past he has never much thought about .... No, I'd say its pretty clear that he has never stopped thinking about those events in his early twenties, and brooding on them. As I was reading, it occurred to me that this novel has a lot in common with another great story about memory, and the life-shattering effects of an incident in youth -- "The Go-Between." Like that great novel, the past is a foreign country ..., and Tony Webster is only just realizing that he is a foreigner in his own life.
