Word: dwights
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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...
...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...
...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...
Susan Eisenhower is the granddaughter of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, and she currently serves as chair of the Washington-based Center for Political and Strategic Studies...