They were the Clares. They had bought the Hale place that summer, and now winter had come and there were just the two houses on the road and she hadn’t seen them much. Sometimes in the morning she would. Either when he raced past in his little car to the college. Or when the wife took the child out of doors. Sometimes, at night, when June walked the dogs, you could see inside their house. She could see them having supper, the little girl between them at the table, the woman getting up and sitting down and getting up again.
What is the worst possible thing that can happen to a family newly arrived in one of those isolated and sequestered and clannish kinds of places like you see in American gothic modern horror stories? The answer is obvious: one spouse is found dead under mysterious circumstances and the other cannot do anything to clarify the mystery. It is one of the narrative tropes defining American fiction since the early 20th century. Part of the appeal for both writers and readers, no doubt, is that this is a modern horror story set-up that exists well outside the range of fiction. It happens with such frequency in America. that entires series devoted to revealing the facts of the case air almost 24/7 on one cable channel or another. And these shows run for extended seasons because, weirdly, the stories being told rarely end up exactly the same.
They went out with their hands in the cookie bag, the older one grabbing one, the younger one punching his arm. They were close, these two. She watched them cross the field and then climb up the steep hill. The clouds were low and dense. Up on the ridge Eddy turned and looked back at the house as if right at her, and he confirmed this with a wave. It was a symbol, she thought, a kind of unspoken agreement—for what, she couldn’t guess.
This is the sort of book in which much of what is important is the stuff that isn’t spelled out. But more importantly, it is also the stuff which also isn’t obvious in the subtext. What is directly spelled out in the scene from which this passage is lifted is that the soon-to-be-dead Catherine Clare seems to have made an immediate electrical sexual connection with a twenty-something kid from town randomly showing up at her house ostensibly looking for some kind of work that might need doing around the house into which they have just moved. The more implicit subtextual content conveys that she may be open to pursuing it further. It’s the information in the gap that is the kind of thing a reader should become attuned to: why might she think of pursuing it further and what will her husband do when he is alerted to that chemical reaction between his wife and the young buck? Or, is that even the relationship in this sequence that is going to be of greater significance at all?
His eyes said, Forgive me.
And she did. That’s how she’d been raised. That’s what the women in her family did. They got through things. They kept going.
She went to confession, because, for some reason, everything wrong in her life seemed like her own fault.
George has recently confessed to some sort of dalliance with another woman though the honest seems to come to an end just before the requisite capper informing her that nothing happened and, furthermore, she has to believe that. When all is said and done this book is the portrait of a malevolent narcissist and as a slight majority of Americans learned at the end of the second decade of the millennium, a narcissist is merely a buffoon until he succeeds in finding an equally damaged and flawed personality eager to encourage the worst aspects of his psychopathy. Is Catherine to blame for being the submissive stimulant powering her husband’s incessant and vain drive to fill the hole where his soul should be? Or might her part of the blame in the tragedy be righty shouldered by family values, religious indoctrination, and systemic patriarchy?
