Ah, that Evil Fiction!

She copped out on me! At some point in the middle of the book, I had the brief thought, "wouldn't it be funny if the bad guy turned out to have multiple personalities?" Then, I thought, "naah, she would never do something so trite. She's too good for that." Apparently not. The meditation on evil and biology just dropped right out of the story about ten or twenty pages from the end. One bad guy tried to escape and the other turned out to have multiple personalities as the result of child abuse. The "monster" who tortured, murdered, and mutilated numerous women, including some children, was turned into a monster by another monster. Then, Lucy's tumor ended up benign, and all of the psychological and neurological investigations just disappeared. I suppose that is the nature of genre fiction, that ideas are a bonus and secondary to action. Perhaps she will continue with the ideas in the next installment, in which I am sure Scarpetta will pursue the child abuser and provide some motivation for the incompetent and conniving fellow who seemed set to destroy the lives of the main circle of characters, our good guys.

Despite my overwhelming disappointment at Cornwell's clichéd resolution to the story, this was a bit of a step in a different direction for her. Rather than a purely evil bad guy, biologically wired to be bad, she looked into how the bad guy was turned into a bad guy (or girl, as the case may be and is) by his environment. The multiple personalities, of which the character had only two, were split into a victim and a predator, which was echoed in one of Benton's contemplations early in the story about researching the features of predators in the wild and in predators in society. The victim personality created the predator personality during her own torture at the hands of an uncle. This same theme is also echoed by Marino (or was it Benton?) in describing Lucy's narcissism, which attributes to emotional abandonment by her mother and in describing his own upbringing as part of the working class in New Jersey. Cornwell has touched on this concept earlier in this series not only with Lucy and a bit with Marino, but also with Scarpetta herself. Their backgrounds have made them the flawed humans that they are. Now, she is applying this to her bad guys, which gives her story a bit more nuance, even with its disappointing end.

Again, I am hoping that Cornwell is just beginning to explore this idea. That is, after all, the nature of serial fiction. The author can begin an idea in one installment, and then develop it in subsequent installments.

Meanwhile, before I read the Cornwell book, I read another that was more of in the New York Times Bestseller list, miscellaneous award-winning, category of fiction. This one, A Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne, had some frustrating middle parts. For instance, she has an Asian character, whom the main character kisses for no plausible reason, who seems rather pointless in the story, even as a symbol. Nonetheless, the book was engaging and had a rather satisfying ending in that it was not at all a resolution to some of the main conflicts in the story.

In this book, the main character is a middle-aged, single author of historical fiction for girls working on a book about Mark Twain and his daughters (hey! I had that idea!) She goes "home" to her sister's house for Thanksgiving to find that she will be spending the week not only with her sister's upper middle class family but also her estranged father who has just suffered a stroke. Naturally, they have many family issues, the main character is considered "pathetic" and "depressed" by her sister's stable family, and many things are not what they seem. This is all the typical fare of many novels of domestic drama.

Except, in this story, they do not all live happily ever after. In fact, in the last chapter, the father dies as the main character sits by his side in an act of passive euthanasia. Her sister and sister's family end up hating her, accusing her of murder at the worst and frigidity at best. Yet, she doesn't feel guilty. Her sister has made peace with their father and tries to force the main character into the same resolution, but the main character realizes that her position in the family was much different than that of her sister. Her sister and father had been close, lost that closeness after the death of the mother decades earlier, and then returned to that closeness at the end of the father's life, realizing that their alienation had been the result of a misunderstanding. The main character, however, realizes that she never had that intimacy with any of the other members of the family. She had no closeness to which she could return. Her emotional pain did not come from the mother's death or alienation from the father after the death, but from the alienation she had experienced since birth.

The main character had accepted her alienation, was still angry and hurt in that way that many people will always be hurt from irreparable childhood damage; but she had gone on with her life and created her own bonds with friends and her own work that she enjoyed. She seemed to be happy, if also sadly aware of her pain. At the end of the story, even as she was ostracized from her sister's family, she was able to see the nature of the individuals and their relationships, without insisting that they were in any way wrong or sick, as they seemed to think about her. This acceptance, as opposed to redemption, seemed a rather unique ending for a modern novel.

Another thing about the story that interested me was the main character's work. All through the story, she offers information about the relationships between Mark Twain and his daughters, as well as about the daughters themselves. In the midst of the story, you begin to think that she is projecting her own family dynamics onto the Twain family, particularly in one explosive scene that does not endear her to her family and their Thanksgiving guests. The main character sees beyond the folksy image of Twain because of the parallells that she sees between her own family and his. In the absence of actual documentation or any great familiarity with the subject of Twain and his daughters (outside of a visit to the Twain home in Hartford and the knowledge that he blamed Christian Science for the death of one daughter, which itself is a long story), I cannot evaluate if the character is allowing her own familial problems to drastically warp her interpretation. What I can evaluate is that the author, Berne, seems to be saying that the historical writer's personal experience can enhance their interpretation of their material. I'm not entirely sure how far she intended to pursue this idea in her story, because she does not seem to actually debate or argue this idea in her text to great length. Still, I rather like the idea. Perhaps that is my own uncritical experience and, therefore, bias.

In any case, this is a book that I wish that I could have written, and perhaps was trying to write with my old Story A. The particulars would, of course, have been drastically different, and I would have delved much more into the perspective versus bias debate; but, the intersection of a individual's history, family history, and historical interpretation (as well as how we know what we think we know, which is another topic for another time) make history very immediate in a much more nuanced way than something like a family tree or a visit to the therapist or writing a regular history book might allow.