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UNINVITED by James Gabriel Berman

UNINVITED

by James Gabriel Berman

Pub Date: June 1st, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51861-1

Berman's first novel is an anti-mystery about an affectless young man accused of killing the entire family of a woman he's been obsessed with for most of his life. Once they decide that Kirk Carver didn't really commit suicide after shooting his wife and children, the police pick up Tony McMahon without asking more than a cursory question or two: They're convinced, from a massively indiscreet letter he wrote about Patricia Carver, that he's the killer. Charlotte Celeste Hinney, the unhappy woman who's looking for refuge from an abusive relationship by writing to Tony, doesn't press him very hard, either; nor does his slick, carnivorous lawyer, Ralph Barolo, who's not interested in whether or not Tony did it, only how he can get him off. And even if everybody did ask Tony what Patricia Carver meant to him, what would they find out? That when they met as children at Jones Beach, he wrecked her sandcastle, gave her a seashell as a peace offering, and lost his heart to her; that he watched her high-school boyfriend assault her on Bonfire Night but agreed to her plea to keep quiet about it while she set about forgetting him; that as an adult he stalked her through the streets and supermarkets of Hautucket and listened inn on her banal phone conversations; that he fantasized obsessively about the sacrifice of Isaac. In fact, they'd find out all the details that fill this understated, agitated, painfully adolescent page-turnerand they'd realize that the whole story, in the absence of any adult perspective on Tony's experience, didn't matter that much in the first place. Despite the publisher's comparisons, this narrow little scrap of gothic embroidery isn't anything like Damage or The Secret History or A Simple Story. The recent novel it most resembles is Austin Wright's Tony and Susan, rewritten by a precocious 12-year-old.