A PALE SONG

Epps chronicles the damage wrought by a broken family in this third installment of his American Wrath trilogy.

Charles “Chuck” Hardy is struggling: his 4-year-old son Brian has begun to display some tendencies that indicate he may have attention deficit disorder and is perhaps autistic, too; simultaneously, Chuck finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage to Samantha (“Sam”), a former airline stewardess he married after impregnating her during a one-night stand in the mid-1990s. As she carries on a series of affairs, Chuck loses himself in the twin distractions of working and drinking. Brian, a loner and outcast from the start, has a few nerdy friends when he reaches high school, but even among those few companions, he is too shy to fully describe an unsettling situation that bedevils him: For a while now, he’s been followed around by a woman in a mysterious black Mercedes. Brian steadies himself enough to earn a partial scholarship to a state school a few hours from home. There, he again struggles socially, spending most of his freshman year quietly stalking a girl named Brandy. Though she disappears for a time, she reappears seemingly from nowhere in his senior year, and the two begin dating. Readers soon learn she’s after Brian for the protection she thinks he might offer on her post-collegiate cross-country journey to drum up Instagram followers and propel her to influencer stardom. While Brian’s parents sink further into their separate miseries, the relationship between Brian and Brandy deteriorates frighteningly, and readers discover that Brian was a victim of childhood sexual abuse—a pattern he reinforces by sexually assaulting Brandy during their trip.

Smoothly written and alluringly-paced, Epps’ third novel succeeds largely on the basis of its character development. Though Chuck is something of a flaccid, passive actor in his own life, readers grow sympathetic toward him once they meet his own useless father; sympathy for Brian is engendered in much the same way. The women in this novel are, perhaps, a bit less fully realized, as Brandy veers into a vanity-obsessed stereotype and Sam feels, at times, like a one-dimensional serial adulterer. Nevertheless, Brian and Chuck will keep readers engaged, warts and all. The author’s flair for description—“Down the highway, lit like a stroke of genius, a white stab of the sun bleached [Brian and Brandy’s] sightline”—peppers the work with memorable lines and genuine originality. Readers in search of a fast-paced page-turner may not find enough here to keep them flying through, but fans of a more literary approach will appreciate Epps’ well drawn characters. While “road” novels are an American tradition and therefore a somewhat crowded field, this work manages to distinguish itself by marrying that tradition to the modern experience of social media and the ways in which Gen Z desperately seeks to monetize their looks and a highly-curated, overly-romanticized, fantasy-driven lifestyle for recognition and remuneration. Finding oneself invested in characters with such glaring flaws is sure to be a satisfying reading experience for those who take the plunge.

A dark, literary family saga played out across the open road with characters readers won’t want to leave behind.