** spoiler alert ** Ever since finishing Somerville's first novel, The Cradle, I have been looking forward to his next novel. Unlike Janet Maslin (see below), I was not disappointed in the slightest (also, by the end of the book I had figured out - as the author intended - who the two characters in the prologue were). This Bright River is different from Somerville's previous novel: it is longer, it has multiple narrators, the reader is sometimes unsure of the narrators' reliability. Somerville, however, maintains control of its many threads (perhaps "streams" would be a better metaphor) and ties everything together in the end.

The story centers around two characters. Thirty-two-year-old Ben Hanson has returned to his small town in order to clean up and sell his uncle's house on behalf of his parents; he is smart, but has been a drifter and a somewhat-accidental criminal. He is preoccupied with his cousin Wayne's death at his uncle's cabin in the woods, many years ago. Lauren, a classmate of Ben's from high school, has also returned to their small town after being away for a long time (college, medical school, volunteering in Chad, a bad marriage to another doctor). She is standoffish, but eventually opens up to Ben. Her narrative is, at times, somewhat rambling and disjointed, and the reader questions whether her ex-husband is dangerous or whether she is simply unstable (turns out the former is true, and spectacularly so).

This Bright River is a family novel, a suspense/mystery novel, and a love story all in one. It is a compelling read with a great sense of place (St. Helens, WI, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula). If straightforward, chronological narrative is your thing, you might not be delighted with this; otherwise, full steam ahead.

Reviews:
"If there’s a middle ground between the pot-boiling, page-turning mystery and the novel of Big Ideas, Patrick Somerville has found it." -Andrew Ervin, NYT Sunday Book Review

Janet Maslin review in NYT

Patrick Somerville in Salon

MN Star Tribune review

Quotes:

Do you know this feeling? Tragedy, but not so close it shatters you. Just enough to be unnerving, and for the feeling never to go away. Close enough to feel it, far enough to stay safe. (Ben, 123)

...eyes still gleaming as she looked around at everything she remembered. (Haley, 159-160)

"[Love is] just so strange. You know? It's like there's no way to say what it is. You can just be in it. Upside down and choking. But then when you have to say what it is, you can't." (Haley, 172)

The amount of healing in the world would always be less, exponentially less, than the amount of pain. Because of, in part, this really simple thing: it's too easy to destroy. It always is. (Lauren, 253)

Almost unbearable disharmony, and yet also a forced admonition that yes, the people you know, and the people you love, don't all live in their own hyperbaric chambers. They can interact. (Lauren, 409)

There is no answer. And it was a though all of us had been passing burdens to one another in the hope that there was. (Ben, 440)

...I didn't understand...how one person can become another, how the seeds are in us to be almost anything. (Lauren, 444)