Michelle Huneven
publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
format
Hardcover
pages
304
Per Petterson
Mrs. Somebody, Somebody
Tracy Winn
With Violets
Elizabeth Robards
Bill Warrington's Last Stand
James King
In BLAME BY Michelle Huneven, a guilty protagonist strives for the good and achieves the beautiful, and eventually, the truth. Huneven’s supple prose elevates small gestures into redemptive acts and everyday objects into restorative gifts, rewarding the reader on every page.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this gripping
tale, Huneven charts the parameters of guilt and how a young,
wisecracking intellectual becomes a shadow of her former self. Patsy
MacLemoore, a boozy history professor, is helping her boyfriend, Brice,
take care of his niece, Joey, whose mother is undergoing cancer
treatment. But when Patsy goes on a bender and emerges from a drunken
blackout in jail, she learns she's accused of having run down a mother
and daughter in her driveway. After her conviction, Patsy transforms
from free spirit into a convict, and Huneven deftly underscores the
bizarre trajectory Patsy's life has taken. In a prison AA group, Patsy
seeks redemption and meaning; she also develops a relationship with the
man whose wife and daughter she killed and helps put his son through
school, stays the course after her release and maintains a friendship
with Brice and Joey. Brilliant observations, excellent characters,
spiffy dialogue and a clever plot keep readers hooked, and the final
twist turns Patsy's new life on its ear. Huneven's exploration of
misdeeds real and imagined is humane, insightful and beautiful. (Sept.)
Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels --Blame, Jamesland and Round Rock. Her nonfiction writings includes restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Weekly, other food journalism and, with Bernadette Murphy, the Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers’ Award for fiction.
Michelle lives in Altadena, California with her husband, Jim Potter.
Beyond the book
latimes.com
BOOK REVIEW
'Blame: A Novel' by Michelle Huneven
A
sympathetic, well-wrought story of a brilliant young woman's slow crawl
toward self-understanding after her life is upended by a horrible
accident.
By Brigitte Frase
September 6, 2009
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 296 pp., $25
We first see the heroine -- and she truly becomes one over the course
of "Blame" -- through the eyes of 12-year-old Joey, who is bedazzled by
her glamorous uncle Brice and his tall, blond girlfriend Patsy
MacLemoore, who's drunk (as usual) when she gives the girl a beer and
botches an attempt to pierce her ears.
A year later, in May 1981, Patsy awakens from a blackout in a
California jail. The sheriff tells her that while turning too quickly
into her driveway the night before, she mowed down a mother and her
young daughter who were passing out Jehovah's Witnesses literature.
Because the deaths occurred on private property, she is allowed to
plead guilty to criminal negligence instead of manslaughter, which she
readily does, remembering absolutely nothing.
The brilliant, beautiful PhD and college history professor finds
herself, at the age of 29, sentenced to four years in a women's
penitentiary. Huneven does a masterful job of describing the tedious,
stressful and at times dangerous conditions Patsy endures amid
arsonists, armed robbers and murderers. She stands up to bullies,
endures the brutal whims of guards and makes enduring friends. She had
heard that in prison there was time "to read, write, make yourself into
a lawyer. Nobody mentioned that the time was filled with the ambient
sounds of women raging, gates clanging, an ever-crackling
public-address system." There is hard work too when she is assigned to
the fire-control squad.
Patsy corresponds with Joey and her long-suffering parents, and she
forms a tentative friendship with Mark Parnham, the bereaved husband
and father who is able to forgive what she cannot.
She resists her fellow inmates' entreaties to join their AA group,
remembering how pathetic she thought her father, who claimed that his
greatest achievement in life was to kick alcohol. Finally she joins,
out of boredom and seeking camaraderie. She dutifully accepts the
routine of spiritual reading, journal-keeping; she would even pray,
"even if her higher power was To Whom It May Concern."
When she is sprung to freedom, Patsy feels like an alien in a mostly
sober society. She'd been a boozer since the age of 13: doing homework
drunk, writing her dissertation drunk, teaching drunk, picking up men
in bars, drunk. Now she learns just how taxing normalcy is, never
having experienced it before. Huneven makes an astute observation when
she has Patsy, at a dinner party, marveling over how slowly people
sipped their wine. She makes a resolution "to be good, whatever that
meant. Her soul, that scrap of energy, was in tatters, no doubt beyond
repair. Her only hope was to make herself useful to others, try to
balance wrong with right."
She continues to go to meetings, resigns herself to never again be the
life of the party, sponsors female prisoners, gets her teaching job
back, makes solid friendships with Brice and his beautiful young lover
Gilles, becomes a second mother to Joey who feels unloved by her
stepmother. She goes into therapy with a shrink who assumes Patsy is
seeking an "authentic, unenslaved self." "Not at all. That never even
occurred to me." Her modest goal is to learn how to live with guilt.
The 20-some years after prison are decent, uneventful ones, but
beautifully rendered as Huneven delves into Patsy's moral struggles and
her deepening relationships. The most complex bond is the one she
forges with Cal Sharp, 35 years older but a charismatic, revered mentor
in AA circles. Despite the misgivings of her friends and family, she
marries him, and they make a rich, though not problem-free life
together. As Cal visibly ages and fades and she sees that they don't
have much to talk about, she is tempted to have an affair with a
vibrant, stimulating colleague but resists, willing to pay the
emotional cost of spurning love: "She was nauseous and elated and
furious. If he'd only kept his mouth shut, they could've ridden it out
to a lower key and gone on for years."
But then, upsetting her careful, penitent life, comes Joey with news
that upends everything Patsy thinks she knows about herself: "[H]istory
demonstrates that events transpire and narratives are built around
them." Good luck, dumb luck, bad luck happen randomly, but people can't
help but build meanings into them.
When we leave Patsy, she has left the house to her bossy
stepdaughter-in-law and her family, looked with sorrow at her doddering
husband asleep in front of the television and moved out to a little
private hideaway, pondering her revised past and her uncertain future.
The satisfactions "Blame" offers readers are elegant prose and, deeper
than that aesthetic pleasure, the intelligence and compassion Huneven
brings to her characters. She holds them all with the utmost tenderness.