Fiction and Life

This week I finished the book, A Judgement in Stone, and I now know the answer to the question "Why?" Long before anyone oppressed her with their love of reading, Eunice was a murderer of people who got in her way.  She kills her father because he's interfering with her life and she kills her employers for the same reason. When her desire to be left in peace (and ignorance) is frustrated, she kills those who thwart her.  But it really is an accident of sorts.  Her friend, the lunatic Joan, sets the conditions under which they both step over the line.  Joan ends up in a coma, and Eunice gets away with murder for a couple of weeks, until the tape recording of the murder comes to light and the game is up.

I found this book to be fascinating and quite realistic.  As a sometime reader of true crime, I find that real criminals are pretty stupid, committing crimes in broad daylight in front of witnesses, or telling their friends what they did, or leaving a trail to their door so obvious that a child could follow it.  Their motives are often mixed up and their decision to kill spontaneous,not--as in detective fiction--thoroughly thought out and carefully planned.

Because of its realism, this novel was quite chilling.  A person who seems alright (if a bit odd) may not be the least bit alright but actually quite dangerous.  People who have such dangerous persons in their homes may not know it until it is too late.  How are we to guard against such eventualities? The fact that we really can't know who is going to suddenly turn irrational and lethal is what is so frightening.

Interesting that even though I knew what was going to happen, I was still riveted to the page until I arrived at that pre-determined end.  The narrator of the book sprinkles a number of "what-ifs" throughout the story, speculating on how tragedy could have been avoided if a different decision had been made.  When I think about that now, I realize the author was playing with us a bit, since she is the one who invented all the decisions and created the tragedy by taking us down the roads that she did.  It's almost as if she is laying out her own decision making process as she plotted the novel and asking us to admire it.  Clever!

Rendell is really quite a good novelist; I recommend her highly and this book in particular.

The book I am currently reading, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, returns me to non-fiction.  It's a memoir by John Ed Bradley, who played center for Louisiana State University in the late 1970s.  Mr. Bradley is also a novelist, and though I have not read any of his other works, I am enjoying his account of being a star football player in both high school and college, and of his life after football, focusing especially on what it was like to stop playing football.

The book takes me back to the John Grisham novel I read recently, Bleachers, which explores the same topic: life after football.  Especially now that we're in the midst of football season, both books help to deepen my insight into the players who entertain us with their skill and talent and heart.

In my next post, I'll let you know what I learn.