Review by New York Times Review
In this novel, the lives of a group of friends are altered by a fatal accident. A VERY good book is not only more satisfying, memorable and coherent than its lesser neighbors on the shelves. It's also more relaxing to read. That wary inhalation as you take in the first lines - Will I believe in these characters? How distracted will I be by implausible dialogue, or forced plotlines? - lasts a page or two and then gives over to a long, slow breath of relief. You don't have to worry. This writer knows exactly what she's doing. She won't let you down. Such is the experience on opening Carol Anshaw's moving and engaging new novel, "Carry the One." Within a chapter it's clear that Anshaw has written not only a funny, smart and closely observed story, but also one that explores the way tragedy can follow hard on celebration, binding people together even more lastingly than passion. Anshaw's opening set piece is the Wisconsin wedding of Carmen Kenney to Matt Sloan in the summer of 1983. An amiable, slightly bohemian outdoor occasion, it's attended by Carmen's (straight) brother, Nick, who is stoned and in drag, and her (gay) sister, Alice, who disappears after the ceremony to have steamy sex with the other bridesmaid, the groom's sister, Maude. Anshaw economically captures details of landscapes both physical ("A small threat of rain was held to a smudge at the horizon") and emotional (noting the older female relatives who gather, "clutching their Instamatics, tears already pooling in the corners of their eyes, tourists on an emotional safari, eager to bag a bride"). Only a few hours later, horror descends. Nick and Maude and Alice, the sisters' friend Jean and her folk singer companion, Tom, all head off into the dim 3 a.m. night, with Nick's casual, drugged girlfriend, Olivia, behind the wheel of her old Dodge. Within minutes, the car strikes a 10-year-old girl who emerges from nowhere onto the darkened road. She dies soon after. The others, though hurt, are not badly injured. Olivia will spend several years in prison; the rest continue their lives bearing different kinds of scars. This heartbreaking event gives Anshaw a starting point and a through line for her portrait of this small group of characters, particularly the three siblings. As the decades pass, we find them irretrievably altered by the girl's death. Sweet, amiable Nick, a brilliant astronomer, initially tries to straighten out as a form of atonement and in order to earn Olivia's love when she's released from prison, though it becomes clear he's engaged in a lifelong battle with addiction to drugs and alcohol. Alice, a gifted painter, has a tormented off-again-on-again relationship with Maude. Her finest pictures are a series of the dead girl, imagined at older, unlived ages. Carmen, though not directly implicated in the car accident, nonetheless feels some responsibility - which is not surprising, since she has always been the family's conscience, taking jobs at a suicide hot line and a battered women's shelter. An activist who attends every abortion clinic defense action and Emma Goldman memorial celebration that comes her way, she's also a devoted mother to the son she was already carrying when she married. For Matt, the moral stain on their marriage left by the car accident will eventually prove too hard to bear. The sisters settle in Chicago, where most of the novel is set (with colorful excursions to Amsterdam and Paris). Anshaw draws from their intertwined lives a rich account of parenthood and family life, some nice sex scenes - Alice remains irresistible to many women, her amorous encounters described with great wit and urgency - and an affecting depiction of sibling love. The deep connections among Alice, Carmen and Nick spring in part from their shared upbringing by cruel, narcissistic parents, but Anshaw wisely plays down these details. The parents' neglect, signaled first by their failure to show up at Carmen's wedding (it isn't cool enough for them) means any emotional support the siblings require they must derive from one another. "Carry the One" is also a fond group portrait of the American cultural left, from the Take Back the Night rallies Carmen badgers Alice to attend in the 1980s, through her despair over the Rwandan genocide of the '90s and on up to the attacks of 9/11. By that point, Nick, forced by Alice to watch live coverage of the twin towers falling, is so drug-addled that he wonders what movie his sister has flipped on. ("Get a grip," she tells him briskly.) A little later, Tom, the self-centered folkie - who has revived his career with a hit song about the girl killed in the accident, to the others' disgust - has a more subdued reaction. As his ex-girlfriend puts it: "I don't think he's terribly interested in a tragedy so big everyone else is in on it. He's a tragedy snob. He doesn't want to stand next to some Nascar guy, both of them waving little flags." THE narrative is warmed throughout by Anshaw's humor, whether she's poking gentle fun at pious Carmen or commenting on changes in lesbian mores. Trying to bond with a younger lover, Alice shows her John Sayles's dated film "Lianna," to which anachronism her lover kindly responds: "This is kind of like Colonial Williamsburg. You know - pioneer folkways." Anshaw is equally sharp on the perils of post-divorce dating, as when Carmen and Alice take an evening course on Proust. Carmen knows she has signed up for the class "mostly to meet someone, but that someone was not Rob. That someone was Ralph Fiennes." Ralph Fiennes proving unavailable, Carmen and Rob find a way to make their surprising connection work, eventually creating, with her son and his anorexic daughter, "one of those awkward, reconstructed families that create a new geometry out of everyone's already existent problems." "Carry the One" has real grief in it too. There is, of course, the haunting sadness the characters continue to feel about the lost girl. The title comes from Alice, who says: "Because of the accident, we're not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one." Yet only Nick has the courage to stay in touch with the girl's mother - a paradoxical twist, since Nick is the novel's other source of grief. As he continues to struggle against the dark suck of addiction, we see vividly how degraded a person of great talent and heart can become, and how helpless that leaves the people who love him. This novel, Anshaw's fourth, arrives bearing warm endorsements from Emma Donoghue and Alison Bechdel, whose wry humanism Anshaw shares. But I found myself wishing Carol Shields were also still around to read it. I think she would have enjoyed a work of fiction that has so much in common with her own: both she and Anshaw give readers the reward of paying close, forgiving attention to ordinary people as they illuminate flawed, likable characters with sympathy and truth. 'I don't think he's terribly interested in a tragedy so big everyone else is in on it. He's a tragedy snob.' Sylvia Brownrigg's new novel for children, "Kepler's Dream," will be published in May under the name Juliet Bell.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 11, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Words used to praise Anshaw's earlier novels (Seven Moves, 1996; Lucky in the Corner, 2002) witty, warm, intimate, poignant apply equally well to her most compelling book yet, a wholly seductive tale of siblings, addiction, conviction, and genius. This tough and tender comedy of misplaced love and beguiling characters begins with a wedding. Pregnant Carmen, a tireless professional do-gooder, is marrying Matt, a volunteer at the suicide hotline she runs. Nick, her crazy astronomer brother, is wearing a wedding dress; his date, Olivia, is wearing a tux; and they've brought enough drugs to get all of Wisconsin stoned. Carmen's sister, Alice, an artist, falls for Matt's sister, Maude. Utterly wasted, Nick, Olivia, Alice, Maude, and a folksinger start driving back to Chicago and strike and kill a young girl. Forever after, they are subjected to the relentless mathematics of guilt: When you add us up, you always have to carry the one. As the years unspool, Alice, frustrated in love, attains fame, even though she hides her best work. Heroically generous Carmen's first marriage quickly fizzles, but her son and, eventually, stepdaughter, are hilarious and wonderful. Sweet, tortured, cosmically gifted Nick remains epically self-destructive. Masterful in her authenticity, quicksilver dialogue, wise humor, and receptivity to mystery, Anshaw has created a deft and transfixing novel of fallibility and quiet glory.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The one that must be carried when the Kenney siblings add themselves up is the girl who was hit and killed when Nick and Alice were driving home, stoned and stupid, from their sister Carmen's wedding. That's the first chapter: the rest of the novel and the rest of their lives-sex and drugs and prison visits, family parties and divorce, raising teenagers, painting, politics, and addiction-play out with that guilt and loss forever in the background. Anshaw has a deft touch with the events of ordinary life, giving them heft and meaning without being ponderous. As the siblings' lives skip across time, Carmen's marriage, shadowed by the accident, falls apart; painter Alice's career moves forward unlike her life, as she remains stuck on the same woman, her former sister-in-law; and astronomer Nick fights, with decreasing success, his craving for drugs. Funny, touching, knowing-about painting and parents from hell, about small letdowns and second marriages, the parking lots where people go to score, and most of all, about the ways siblings shape and share our lives-Anshaw (Seven Moves) makes it look effortless. Don't be fooled: this book is a quiet, lovely, genuine accomplishment. (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her fourth novel (after Lucky in the Corner), award-winning writer Anshaw presents memorable characters whose lives have been affected by a single tragedy, which results in heartbreak and missed second chances. Twenty years earlier, siblings Alice and Nick leave their sister Carmen's wedding at 3 a.m., stoned, tipsy, and unfamiliar with the dark country roads; Olivia, Nick's girlfriend, is driving. A few miles on, Olivia hits and kills a girl walking on the side of the road. Over the years, the accident is always in the background for all the characters. Alice, a successful artist, goes in and out of lesbian relationships and obsessively paints more than a dozen portraits of the girl who was killed. Carmen's marriage does not last, and she buries herself in worthy causes. Olivia serves a brief prison sentence and then leaves Nick because of his drug habit. Nick, now a promising astronomer, is the one who broods the most deeply over the past. VERDICT Anshaw deftly depicts family ties broken and reconnected, portraying the best and the worst of this group of eccentrics. Recommended for readers of well-crafted literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/23/11.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
