Word: ethane
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...other students in his dorm set up their computers--but now, she said, "the dorm people are outraged." Stacy May, 17, another dorm neighbor, said she and others had decided to snub him. "Everybody I know is not going to say hi to him. He's an awful person." Ethan Berger, 18, had more practical advice: "I'd leave if I were...