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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS BOOKS, Page 66Teenage Werewolf
By JOHN SKOW
TITLE: BEFORE AND AFTER
AUTHOR: Rosellen Brown
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 354 Pages; $21
THE BOTTOM LINE: Yes, you do know where your son is: jail.
Until children can be flash-frozen at 12 and thawed out as
college juniors, a technological advance that surely will start
a new service industry, Rosellen Brown's plot can be counted on
to grab a mother or father by the ventricles. Lying awake in
sweaty sheets at 3 a.m., any parent of any teenager sees an
immediate future more or less like Brown's melodrama: a
17-year-old New Hampshire boy named Jacob, no sulkier or more
hostile than the next kid, suddenly goes septic and gets himself
into hideous trouble. The cops, in fact, think he has bludgeoned
his pregnant girlfriend to death with a car jack. It becomes
clear to his parents (who knew nothing about the girlfriend) and
younger sister that he is probably guilty, though when he is
caught after several days, he refuses to say a word. The lawyer
they hire isn't encouraging. Local peasants mutter and look
sullen.
Brown, the respected author of Civil Wars and Tender
Mercies, is a skilled and subtle observer. She pays careful,
measured attention to the reactions of Carolyn, Jacob's mother,
a pediatrician who believes that truth is too important for
compromise; Ben, a talented sculptor who lies combatively for
his son; and Judith, a bright, somewhat withdrawn girl who even
before the crime was troubled by her brother's unruly sexuality.
But too much care, too much measuring, give the novel a somewhat
mechanical quality that prevents it from being first rate.
Parents and sister are complex and believable, but seem chosen
from a casting service for the way they balance one another --
she the idealistic scientist, he the passionate artist, the
second child just the right age and sex to be most wounded. And
the murder itself, though it could have happened, is kept at two
or three removes of narration and never made to seem real and
inevitable, something that might have occurred between two
anguished people.
Jacob, unlike his parents and sister, rarely appears as
more than a sketched figure. He seems not to have a life, but
merely a function: to set off the family torment, so the author
can take notes. Carolyn dutifully worries now and then about
how the parents of the dead girl are feeling, but mostly the
troubled family's misery is airless. The legal and psychological
entanglement seems oddly phantasmagorical, lacking independent
reality. As an expression of parental dread, of being trapped
and unable to help one's children in a situation of vaguely
defined horror, the fears are vivid enough. But they are a
product of the 3 a.m. sweats, and in Before and After, the
author never really breaks them free into the waking world.