Childhood Attachments, review by Marilyn Stasio

THE FALSE FRIEND

By Myla Goldberg

253 pp. Doubleday. $25.95

It’s not hard to understand why an introspective writer like Myla Goldberg, who gravely examined a sensitive child’s yearning to be special in her first novel, “Bee Season,” might want to switch to a genre format to write a going-back-home narrative of adult self-­discovery. Within the conventional novel, it takes some tricky maneuvers to return a grown-up child to the family bosom. Traditional holidays and reunions still serve for short visits, although you’re probably sick to death of those predictable flare-ups over the Thanksgiving turkey. But extended stays demand something more dramatic in the way of a plot. While the death of an elderly parent or an ailing sibling works in theory, it shifts the attention away from the prodigal child. And that can be a real problem when the writer’s primary interest is in sending the protagonist back to revisit his or her younger self, not to fuss over funeral arrangements and be upstaged by the dearly departed.

The genre novel provides a tidy solution in the form of a crime: not the death, but the murder of a parent; not the wedding, but the disappearance of a sibling or a friend. There’s no better narrative device than a crime to get someone on the next plane, train or bus back home.

That’s essentially what Goldberg has done by conceiving “The False Friend” as a psychological suspense story. Celia Durst, who works in Chicago and lives with an understanding guy named Huck, takes off like a shot for her family home in Jensenville, a suburb of Syracuse, after a long-suppressed memory surfaces to convince her that she lied about the disappearance of her childhood best friend, Djuna Pearson, who vanished the summer they were 11 years old. Djuna was not abducted by a stranger in a car. That was just a story Celia made up to hide her cowardice from the three other girls who had followed them into the woods on their way home from school.

If the adult Celia thought confession would cleanse her conscience, she thought wrong. No one believes her story, and all she discovers after tracking down those three girls — who allowed themselves to be bullied by Djuna and Celia, their much more popular schoolmates — is what horrid little creatures she and Djuna had actually been. “Sometimes you were just plain evil,” Celia is shocked to learn from one of these persecuted girls, the one who tried to kill herself.

In detective fiction, it’s the fate of the lone-wolf sleuth to press on with an investigation when everyone keeps telling her she’s out of her mind. Goldberg handles this protocol well, convincing us that Celia’s efforts to set the record straight are based on moral conviction. But even where Goldberg is faithful to the formula of the suspense novel, she doesn’t really accept the dynamic that goes with it.

Celia’s cleareyed re-evaluation of Jensenville — the hard-working industrial town that once seemed “as firmly rooted as a sycamore” — takes in every aspect of its physical deterioration, but in a coolly dispassionate way that evokes no anger over its history or suspense about its fate. In a crime story, the dissection of a decaying landscape takes on urgency only when the purpose is to expose the source of moral corruption. With no tangible evil to rout (Djuna’s kidnapper being long gone or totally imaginary), there’s no menace behind Goldberg’s detailed descriptions of the scene of the possible crime.

In the same way, Celia’s intense interrogations of everyone from Djuna’s mother to the local cops elicit nothing particularly revealing. And since Celia’s former classmates aren’t viable murder suspects, her talks with them lack the penetrating thrust of forensic interviews, which by definition are based on the assumption that someone has a secret to hide.

In fact, all the talk in these interviews is circular, coming back to Celia and the guilt she feels over something she did — or didn’t do — all those many years ago, when she and Djuna were basking in the power and glory of their exclusive friendship. Celia’s soul-searching is the true subject here, and while it doesn’t lend itself to the other-­directed focus of the suspense novel, it doesn’t fare much better when read (or reread) strictly as a story of self-­discovery.

For someone with identity issues, Celia shows little awareness of what other people think of her, or how they feel about her chilly indifference. And although her self-­absorption suits the obsessive nature of the task she’s set for herself, it also allows for some extremely precious prose. Goldberg is perfectly capable of writing a lovely passage about the “arboreal endgame” Celia observes being played out between her elderly parents and the flowering pear trees on their street, also nearing the final stage of their life cycle. But she’s more often inclined to strain for an image, as when Celia encounters the semi-familiar parking lot of her old high school, and the sensation is like meeting “a gap-toothed former baby sitter who had gotten bridgework.” She also resorts to verbal contortions to evoke the “intimate, sweet-tinged musk” of an unwashed sleeping bag. Technical matters aside, the language police would have Goldberg up on charges if she tried to get away with that kind of writing in a real suspense novel.

Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Stasio-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print