THE AMATEUR

An accident at the golf course cuts short one life and totally upends another.

“At fifteen, I couldn’t outdrive the very best men’s players at the club, but I still beat all of them most of the time. My short game was as precise as a drone strike, and I was excellent on the greens.” Mira Winston is an unusually confident and self-aware teenager, and her voice on the page is irresistible. (As we will later learn, the narrator of Bohjalian’s 25th novel is herself the author of 25 novels, so perhaps it’s no surprise her storytelling skills are as impressive as her golfing.) Mira’s fictional memoir revolves around the events of Aug. 3, 1978, at a country club in New York’s Westchester County. It was her senior summer; she was 18 and on her way to Yale in a matter of weeks when a ball she smashed into the practice net went through the mesh and out the other side, hitting and instantly killing a young caddie named Kenny Foster as he was waiting to be called to carry bags. The accident has dramatic results, both immediately and over the next few years: Mira doesn’t matriculate at Yale, she never plays golf again, and in an unexpected twist, it’s revealed to one and all that she’s been having an affair with a man named Theo Catton, who’s her father’s age, and with whom she’s been involved since she was 15. Mira is well aware of the resemblance between her story and Lolita’s—she will later get a line from the novel tattooed on her forearm—but she also now understands that the younger her was sorely misled about her own agency and motivations. As the small-town drama simmers, as Mira and her parents self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, as Mira eventually comes to trial—the story is spun by then as “privileged rich girl with too much attitude recklessly kills a poor student with so much promise”—a marvelous 11th-hour twist and a satisfying denouement lie ahead. It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.

Nabokov’s classic reinvented as a 1970s moral fable, with brilliantly developed characters and period detail.