THIS SHINING LIFE

Life—the worst and best of it—goes on after a shocking death in this moving novel.

The story of a family coping with the death of a beloved middle-aged man could easily tip into mawkishness, but this assured first novel avoids that with a crisp pace, complex characters, and an unflinching depiction of how grief can blindside us. Rich is a schoolteacher who lives in rural Devon with his wife, Ruth, and their 10-year-old son, Ollie. Ruth’s irascible mother, Angran (toddler Ollie’s mashup of Angela and Grandma), and sister, Nessa, live nearby, which is a mixed blessing. When Rich is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, his impulse is to grab every bit of joy he has left and to let people know how much he loves them. Rich might face death bravely, but his family falls apart, all their long-simmering conflicts welling up like the bad drains in Angran’s decrepit cottage. Kline structures the book with short chapters that rotate among the points of view of Ruth, Nessa, Angran, Ollie, and Rich’s parents, Gerald and Marjorie. Ruth and Angran both struggle with depression; Ruth was more dependent on Rich than she realized, and Angran is deeply bitter still that she raised her daughters alone. Nessa is a take-charge schoolteacher whose close friendship with Rich long preceded his marriage to Ruth, and her battles with her mother and sister stretch back decades. Tenderhearted Marjorie is grappling not only with the loss of her son, but with her domineering husband’s descent into dementia. And Ollie, the center of the book and the only character whose chapters are written in the first person, is on the autism spectrum; his father was the main source of the stability he so deeply needs, and after Rich's death he’s both adrift and unable to express it except through his obsession with a list of gifts his father left to be distributed to his survivors. Kline captures the difficulty of navigating grief in its myriad forms, she finds mordant humor as well as tenderness in its domain, and she doesn’t shy from showing how it can bring out the worst in us as well as the best.

Grief sharpens old conflicts among a cancer victim’s survivors in this poignant novel.