20 Nov 2012 00:46:48
Combined, the events in Carry the One could make a catalogue of tragedy. The novel begins in 1983, with five drunk and drugged-up friends accidentally killing a young girl as they drive home from a wedding in Wisconsin. What follows is 25 years chasing penance, with plenty of disappointments and a couple more deaths thrown in. And yet the novel never buckles under its weight. The gentle panorama Carol Anshaw builds from everyday vignettes makes Carry the One feel deceptively light. The narrative glides through the lives of Alice and Nick, who were in the car, and their older sister Carmen, whose wedding they were celebrating. Saintly Carmen, pregnant and impulsively married, works in a women's shelter, campaigns for social justice and props up her siblings when they fall. Alice, obsessed with painting and with the fellow bridesmaid she slept with on the night of the accident, becomes an eventual star of the art world – and of some of the book's sexy passages. Nick, a gifted astronomer crippled by addiction, seeks escape from one in the other.
Although there is plenty of heartbreak and pain, significant events often take place in the uncharted spaces between chapters; Anshaw shows us the results of change rather than the moment itself. She glosses over drama to focus on those small, seemingly banal but powerfully revealing asides that occur in kitchens, bedrooms and cars everywhere.
Carry the One is a finely crafted novel, full of phrases you want to cut out and keep, and characters you think you know. It is delicate in its touch yet huge in its reach.
