SAY THIS

A pair of oblique novellas trace the reverberations of a killing.

Levine, author of the short story collection This Wicked Tongue (2019), touches only tangentially on the murder that shapes the lives of the characters of Eva Hurries Home and Son One. By 2018, when a journalist contacts Eva, the central figure of the first novella, she is 41, working as an assistant college registrar in Washington, D.C., and the senseless murder committed by her cousin in Oregon is 13 years in the past. Even further in the past is her murky relationship with that cousin, whom she was sexually exploited by, and in love with, when she was somewhere between 11 and 16, the details still foggy for her. In spare, enigmatic chapters, Levine follows her through her ordinary, haunted days and then on a trip which resolves almost nothing and on which she meets with the journalist as well as with her cousin's estranged stepmother and, briefly, the imprisoned cousin himself. The more diffuse and less successful second novella follows the lives and thoughts of several of the relatives of the murdered man, a labor law specialist who had a few secrets, over many years following his death, moving back and forth through time. While Levine successfully communicates the ripple effects of the crime on a family already fractured before the murder, the novella becomes repetitive and bogged down in academic jargon, particularly in the chapters told from the perspective of the murdered man's professor sister. Although pairing these novellas in theory widens their impact, in practice it dilutes the concentrated strength of Eva Hurries Home. At their best, Levine's brief, mysterious chapters resemble poetry, leaving the reader to establish links and make conjectures about connections even the characters themselves do not fully understand.

A thoughtful study of the aftereffects of violent crime.