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)
