Before You Know Kindness
by Chris Bohjalian
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Book Summary Information
Author: Chris BohjalianEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-09
ISBN: 1400031656
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Before You Know Kindness
Book Review: Brilliant
Summary: 4 Stars
I truly can't say enough about this finely crafted brilliant novel, and I will explain in a minute why I gave it four instead of five stars; really it should be 4.5 stars.
The beginning certaiinly gets the reader's attention: It's a nauseatingly graphic description of a near-fatal gunshot wound to Spencer McCullough's shoulder; complete with gushing blood, pulverized muscle, and so forth. So we know right away that something catasrophic has happened to this man, and I, at least, was not quite sure he lived.
Then we get into the story. Here we have a quite unusual upper-class extended family. The mother, a seventy-something sports fanatic (and I mean PLAYING, not watching!) divides her time between Manhattan and her summer house in New Hampshire. Her two grown children, spouses and families live in Vermont and Manhattan, respectively. The son John, a lawyer, and his wife, a therapist, have two children: 10-year-old Willow and infant Patrick. Daughter Katherine teaches at an exclusive private school that her daughter attends. Her husband Spencer, the wounde-ee, if you will, is a fanatic animal-rights activist in the upper echelons of FERAL, a group so rigid and righteous that it puts PETA to shame. And don't get me wrong; I am passionate about animal rights, but the descriptions of FERAL often had me laughing.
The accident, horrific in its pain and terror, happens about a third into the book. Let's just say it involves a HUNTING RIFLE, of all things ironic, and that Spencer's own cocky pre-teen daughter Charlotte, high from forbidden marijuana and beer stolen at a country club party, pulls the trigger. The rest of the book is the finely drawn description of the changes, marital and otherwise, that affect each member of the extended family, from the very patrician grandmother down to 10-year-old Willow, un unwitting accomplice and a child far beyond her years in wisdom.
And that fact, and one other, are the only two things that prevented me from giving five stars. The first is that, as endearing as she is, I found Willow to be beyond anything I know a 10-year-old girl to be, and I have been a mother, an aunt, and a friend to many a precocious child. My second involved confusion as the author switched from scathing satire about FERAL to his own version of animal activism, describing in horrible detail the way live lobsters are killed (I don't think I can eat another one) and how deer suffer in the hunt, and on and on. It was disconcerting to go from laughing at FERAL to crying over the animals, and it didn't really make sense to me in the larger arena of the novel.
However, I truly found this a brillint book, and recommend it highly.
Summary of Before You Know Kindness
Chris Bohjalian, bestselling author of Midwives, presents his most ambitious and multi-layered novel to date--examining wildly divisive issues in today?s America with his trademark emotional heft and spellbinding storytelling skill.On a balmy July night in New Hampshire a shot rings out in a garden, and a man falls to the ground, terribly wounded. The wounded man is Spencer McCullough, the shot that hit him was fired?accidentally??by his adolescent daughter Charlotte. With this shattering moment of violence, Chris Bohjalian launches the best kind of literate page-turner: suspenseful, wryly funny, and humane.If you imagine most writer's bathrooms (and this is probably a mistake) you'd picture damp towels in a clump on the floor, hair in the soap, a few mildewed paperbacks stacked on the counter. But it's impossible to picture Chris Bohjalian's bathroom as anything but an Architectural Digest centerfold: polished counters, not a stray thread on the plush towels, the modulated colors sparked to life by fresh flowers from a neighbor's garden.
Bohjalian's eighth novel, Before You Know Kindness, is a beautifully observed, delicately balanced portrait of a family that could only come from the hands of a tireless craftsman who keeps reaching into his story to straighten the tulips or tuck in a shirttail. It begins with two EMTs leaning over animal rights' activist Spencer McCullough's gushing shotgun wound and winds back through the ordinary days leading up to the extraordinary accident, and then forward again as Spencer and his family come to terms with what has happened. As ambitious as other Bohjalian novels, Before You Know Kindness spirals out to encompass the larger issues of Spencer's political loyalties and the heartless, passionate world of political spin. Some readers may find Bohjalian's style too smooth. Others will relish the completeness of his vision and his obvious tenderness for even the most difficult of his characters. --Regina Marler
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