Word: schwartz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
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...
...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...
...market -- but only on the back of heavy sacrifice. BP's $48 billion acquisition of Amoco will see about 6,000 jobs slashed in Cleveland and Houston. "With oil prices weak, the only way for companies to remain profitable is to cut their costs," says Fortune correspondent Nelson Schwartz. "Exxon and other companies have actually boosted their profits despite the depressed market by improving their efficiency." The merger will allow BP and Amoco to remain competitive by pursuing an economy of scale. Says Schwartz, "Bigger is better in oil as in everything else." Except, perhaps, if you're an Amoco...