Twice - Lisa Unger (Lisa Miscione)

Title: twice

Author: Lisa Unger (Lisa Miscione)

Publisher: Broadway

Publish date: 2004

ISBN: 978-0-307-95317-9

To describe a novel jam-packed with brutal death, revenge, maniacs, monsters and more as ‘delightful’ may seems wrong, but really that’s what it is. A fantastic, fresh, young zest for life bounces innocently through the pages describing (with considerable skill) horror after horror – and it’s a great combo.

It’s an early Lisa Unger book, and she’s still writing under her maiden name. Having read some of the later ones I was surprised initially at some of the tell-tale flourishes and pet-projects of a writer slightly less in control than they might be. The earlier chapters are peppered with description of what designer brand of jeans the main characters are wearing, what type of plush covering they have on their cushions, what upmarket ingredients they have in their salad, what their ‘taut’ bodies are like. The language oozes the writer’s own appreciation for these things, and it’s a funny little paradox that while the main character couple move in together they’ve ‘got rid of most of their own furniture and belongings’ because ‘new beginnings demand new objects’, one of them ‘never developed attachments to things anyway.’ A very New-York sort of Designer-Zen where you change your yoga-mat for the latest model every six months and have state-of-the-art surround sound system playing you waterfalls and birdsong in a very expensive, sterile apartment. (My description, not hers.) One laughs a little at this, but the fact is Unger is a very sensual writer, and everything is described in heightened ‘appreciation’: the stench of the subterranean network under New York, the way a policeman’s face is ‘dirty and round as a potato’, a slashed vinyl cover to a discarded table ‘gaping like a mouth’. They don’t stop coming, and it makes for an engaging read. There is, it’s true, quite a bit of doubling up, and the whole book feels as if it’s been written at breakneck speed, never looking back, as if the monsters in the book are running after the author. ‘Grey’ must be used at least 50 times throughout the novel (I’m reading on paperback, can’t do a word count). A lot of things are ‘musty’ and smell of ‘damp earth’. There’s a wonderful description of a librarian who’s ‘as dusty as an old unabridged dictionary’, but then half a page later the same librarian is interviewed and she’s neat and bright as a new penny. A certain house has an ‘evil smell’ – again a combination of ‘musty’ and ‘earth’ but no mention of the pipe that the owner subsequently lights up. A few homophone word-errors thrown in here and there simply season the ‘this is bursting out of my skull’ impression.

Plot? It’s the third in a series of four books featuring Lydia Strong, a crime novelist (ahem) who turns private investigator. Yeah, I know. But it’s charming.  The serial killer who murdered her mother 16 years back has escaped from a mental asylum, and is on the loose with Lydia in his sights. Meanwhile she and her partner in life and in the private investigation firm, Jeffrey, have been hired to look into the brutal murder of a famous artist’s husband. Lots of layers of history, family feuds, layers of New York, criss-crossing of both narratives, rich succulent sensory details throughout. The plot’s fairly intricate and though the story may be written fast it’s certainly not been pantsed. (I can relate to that a lot.) I was surprised, after the other books Unger books I’d read, that the tenor seemed so different, but then the twins flit across the screen and suddenly the language sharpens, just for a moment, and you know at once they’re at the heart of the matter. Lost children. Over and over again. It doesn’t get old, mind, they’re all different. Unger’s foreshadowing in this novel is a bit heavy-handed, and the main jist of the interwoven ‘twists’ are apparent in the early chapters but it’s all good, you can just see the general direction and there are endless details and mini-stories to keep you going. Page-turner? Definitely.

I was particularly grateful on a personal level to have had the opportunity to read this. Stymied myself in a Slough of Despond, not writing anything for months for no good reason, this bouncy narrative might be just the inspiration to get things going. Thank you Lisa Unger! Four happy moose-hoofs up… the one only taken off for the little errors and gleeful carelessness. Because one has to if one’s marking, but wouldn’t really otherwise.

FRAGILE by Lisa Unger

Book Quote:

“It didn’t take long for tensions to build. The three of them – the pretty cheerleader, the sexy burnout too old, too knowing for her age, the geek with gothic leanings – they were all there, these representative of the perennial high school subcultures. Squirming and pink beneath the shells of their adulthoods. Maggie thought that childhood things would be left behind, these silly groupings would fade and become meaningless, but they never were. Not in a town like this. Those teenage girls, each awkward and unsure in her own way, never left the Hollows.”

Fragile is set in a small town 100 miles from New York City, called “The Hollows.” The dynamics between family clusters, over the generations within the sometimes stifling small-town boundaries, form the emotional backbone of this well-crafted thriller.

The central group is the Cooper family. With Jones (the father) being the chief detective in the Hollows police force and Maggie (the mother) being a psychologist, they are strategically placed to know what’s going on in town when something out of the ordinary happens. Their son Ricky is a high school student, and the disappearance of his girlfriend Charlene is the signal for the mystery to begin in earnest.

There are two other main family groups. The first group is that of the Murrays: with moody Melody the mother, Charlene the disappearing would-be rock star, and Graham the stepfather with dubious intentions. The second is the Crosbys: the family with a strong current of violence and intimidation, which includes the mostly absent mother Angie, Travis the bully policeman father, and Marshall their deeply troubled son.

The childhood histories of the generation now in their prime are insolubly linked. As their past actions seem to have become part of the silent fabric of the Hollows, a unique dread, like a recurring nightmare, stalks the story as the plot unfolds. Unspoken terror of retributive karma lends the narrative a tinge of ghost-like fear.

Two entwined themes weave through the novel with the intensity of obsession. The first of these is the theme of the lost girl.

No fewer than three lost girls wander through the pages of Fragile. Charlene Murray, the current missing girl, is the novel’s immediate raison d’être. Sarah Myer, from a generation back, brings the weight of the past to the narrative. Charlie the pest-control guy’s Lily brings a resonating chord from the world outside the Hollows.

As Unger states in a note on the text, the core idea for the narrative evolved from an incident in her childhood, where a student went missing from her own high-school. One is left with a distinct impression that the distance of the memory, its initial emotional impact and the diverse aspects in which it has reflected on in the author’s own life have a strong bearing on the general tone of the novel. How memory both changes the future and shapes our perception of what we now are is the subject of the other main theme of the novel: change.

In the most concrete sense, change and the lack of it are built up through family portrayals, in shards of continuity or broken lines. Maggie would like to paint but she’s too busy – meanwhile her mother’s attic is full of her father’s old paintings. Charlie would like to write, and eventually finds out that his father used to write. Charlie’s colleague Wanda knows all about cars because her daddy worked for Ford. The Crosby family are all policemen and bullies– “the gene gets stronger every generation.” Jones hates his mother for dominating his life, but dominates his son and disbelieves him in turn, reflecting his own fears onto Ricky without bothering to think about who the new generation really is.

Which links can or should be broken? What kind of change is possible? Through exploration of these relationships, so circumscribed by location and custom, the novel eventually posits that only by admitting the past – both our own deeds and those of our forbears – and incorporating it into our existence, can we “grow up.”  The crystallisation that hidden fear forces onto a character is a type of stagnation, a decomposition.

Through the pages of carefully-constructed prose one clearly sees a diligent writer taking enviable care in their craft: a writer who hates sloppiness and unintentional ambiguity. This preciseness for a long time seemed to sit at odds with a certain out-of-focus quality to the tenor of the narrative.

Initially I put this characteristic down to lack of immediate “need to write;”  it seemed to suggest meticulous but slightly mechanical work without a great deal of emotional force behind it. This conclusion was somewhat spurred on by the fact that character portrayal in Fragile is extremely female-heavy, and empathy for any character is late in coming. Not to say that we don’t know how the male characters look, behave or think – it’s that we don’t feel what it’s like to be inside them. Not even Jones, who is heavily analysed.

However, as the story progressed it started to become apparent that the emotional freeze imposed on the writing was precisely mirroring that which the characters suffered from. The thaw descends on the structure of the language, the plot, and the characters simultaneously. Such a demonstration of union between language, emotion and story is truly impressive.

I went in a sceptic, and came out a fan. Unger’s Beautiful Lies is already sitting on my shelf, waiting.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Review, 2011)