#Titanuary ‘River Road’ by Carol Goodman

About the book…

In the midst of a snowstorm, creative writing professor, Nan Lewis, thinks she hit a deer.

But then a police officer tells her that her student, Leia Dawson, has been killed in a hit-and-run on River Road. And there is blood on Nan’s car.

Nan finds herself reviled by the same community that supported her when her young daughter was killed in a similar accident six years ago.

The people around her are hiding secrets she’ll have to uncover to clear her name and find out who really killed Leia…

This book literally had me written all over it, I read, too many years ago, Carol’s ‘The Lake Of Dead Languages’ and for some reason never followed up her other books. So when I saw ‘River Road’, I had to get it!

This is one of those twisting, intense narratives that plunges you into the story from the very first page You are in the car with Nan after a faculty event-gone horribly wrong- when she hits…what? Who?

Nan’s sense of reality has been distorted and fickle since the day her daughter died, a death for which there was a type of justice, in that the drunk driver was caught and duly punished.

However, since then, she has lost her husband and her work at Archeron University is the only thing she has left. Her students are her life so that the notion she may have been involved in the death of her most promising one, cuts down to the bone.

Nan’s insitence that she hot a deer, contradicts her behaviour on the night of the accident to the point that she even doubts herself.

As she pulls apart the events of that day, the reader goes with her, eager to find out the full details of what is fleetingly alluded to at the very start.

This is a beautifully constructed novel which peels back its layers as the principal figures examine their moivation for behaving the way that they do. It’s dark but not unrelentingly so, there are moments of real humour which intesifies the sadness of this grief stricken woman.

It says so much about the position of women in today’s society-without a child, is she still a mother? How her family treat her as a failure, a liability is so heartbreaking. Nan stumbles around a landscape of grief without a map, no one is there to help her out, not really.

The mystery at the centre of the story is what happened to Leia, but there is so much more to ‘River Road’ than this. It discusses art and the ownership of ideas, the relationship of experience to truthfulness in writing. It has a story within the story as Nan works through the creative writing that the students have submitted and,much like the Uly in student Troy’s post modern imagining of ‘The Odyssey’, has to make her way back home to the person she is supposed to be.

There is an essence of a Grecian tragedy, with portents, omens, myths and a wailing chorus of sadness in the prospect of potential unfulfilled by Leia’s death. It’s very moving, very poignant and gripping, I loved it.

About the author…

Carol Goodman is the author of ‘The Lake Of Dead Languages’, ‘The Seduction Of Water’, which won the Hammett Prize, and ‘The Widow’s House’, which won the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She is also the co-author, with her husband Lee Slonimsky, of the Watchtower fantasy trilogy. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Greensboro Review, Literal Latte, The Midwest Quarterly, and Other Voices. After graduation from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin, she taught Latin for several years in Austin, Texas. She then received an M.F.A. in fiction from the New School University. Goodman currently teaches literature and writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz and lives with her family in the Hudson Valley.