Now that the Dallas Morning News is charging to view their content I realize when I post a book review here you can’t read it unless you pay, so since it’s a few days old, I’ll post the text here. I liked the book and think it’s a gutsy novel.
\nBENT ROAD\/By Lori Roy\/Dutton; 368 pages, $25.95
\nPain & Suffering on the Great Plains
\nThomas Wolfe famously proclaimed \u201cYou can\u2019t go home again,\u201d and with her first novel, \u201cBent Road,\u201d Lori Roy proves that if you try, you\u2019ll regret it. The story begins in 1965, when race riots in Detroit force the urbanized Scott family to return to their Midwestern roots in Kansas, to a small town that seems to have one thoroughfare, Bent Road. It\u2019s a world of church-going farmers with closets so full of skeletons you couldn\u2019t find a shoebox without a few bones in it. An example of Kansas Gothic, \u201cBent Road\u201d has enough turmoil to make Truman Capote\u2019s \u201cIn Cold Blood\u201d appear rather genteel. In Capote\u2019s hands, strangers were the menace. Here it\u2019s family.
\nAs a mystery novel, \u201cBent Road\u201d delivers: the story telling is taut, suspenseful, and compelling. From the moment the Scott family drives up to their new home in the dead of night, only to be spooked by a shadowy figure running across the road, you know there\u2019s trouble ahead. The point of view shifts between Celia, the wife and anchor, and (mainly) her two children, Daniel and Eve-ee. Celia does a great deal of dish-washing and cooking, and provides the outsider\u2019s perspective of what it\u2019s like to return to a Kansas farm where a shed in which the darling daughter and sister died some twenty years ago still stands.
\nMystery surrounds Eve\u2019s death, and the family doesn\u2019t discuss it. Was she murdered by Jack Mayer, escaped lunatic? By the alcoholic Uncle Ray? To complicate matters, only a few days after the Scotts return to Kansas, another young girl goes missing, Julianne Robison, who happens to look much like the lost Eve. Plus Eve-ee also happens to look like the lost Eve. Descriptions are rather minimal here\u2014small, blonde, cute\u2014so perhaps half the daughters in Sixties-era Kansas looked like Eve.
\nCelia\u2019s husband, Arthur, is the father figure who moves them back to Kansas, and who knows what happened to Eve. His sister Ruth also knows what happened, it seems, but she keeps the truth from her husband, Ray, who famously loved Eve. Townsfolk believe Ray murdered Eve years ago, and that perhaps now he\u2019s responsible for Julianne Robison\u2019s disappearance. Ray assaults Ruth not long into the story, and she then moves in with the Scott family. Smart mystery readers will smell a rat, though, as Ray\u2019s in the suspect file labeled Too Obvious.
\nIn its best moments, \u201cBent Road\u201d portrays the loneliness and claustrophobia of life in a small Great Plains town, in the tradition of Kent Haruf\u2019s \u201cPlainsong.\u201d It\u2019s much gorier and melodramatic than Haruf\u2019s fiction, however, and by the novel\u2019s end, the body count is high, placing it in the Gothic tradition. But if you like a gutsy, gritty read, you\u2019ll love \u201cBent Road.\u201d Spoiler alert: The shadowy figure crossing the road in the first scene is probably Orville Robison. (Or Bigfoot.) Roy never actually reveals who it\u2019s supposed to be. Robison is a good guess. But I\u2019m giving nothing away. You\u2019ll have to read the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now that the Dallas Morning News is charging to view their content I realize when I post a book review here you can’t read it unless you pay, so since it’s a few days old, I’ll post the text here. … Continue reading