THE BALLAD OF D.J. STABLER

A man traumatized as a child—and as an adult—writes a best-selling memoir and then vanishes in Atreides’ novel.

Donald Jeffrey Stabler is working as a law clerk when he falls hard for Ellen Chandler, a beautiful paralegal; he isn’t accustomed to receiving the flirtatious attention of attractive women. Unfortunately, she is also violent and deranged, and likely responsible for the death of her father and one of her brothers. Stricken “dick blind” by her romantic overtures, he agrees to tamper with jury instructions relevant to an ongoing case in which she is the defendant. Eventually, after suffering terrible physical abuse at her hands (“She landed a round-house punch to my temple. It took me completely by surprise and I fell on my ass in the middle of the living room. Her foot shot out. I curled up into a ball. Sharp kicks pounded along my backside. Out of breath, she shouted between gasps, ‘You useless asshole!’ and stormed out”), he confesses, skips town, adopts an alias (“Jeff Morgan”) and tries to hide from her wrath. A confrontation ends violently; in the aftermath of the crisis, DJ writes a memoir that becomes a public sensation and, presumably overwhelmed by the scrutiny, vanishes and is presumed dead. Kelly Harris, his therapist and close friend, isn’t quite sure he really is dead, though, and begins to unravel DJ’s tortured past of childhood physical and sexual abuse. This is an ambitiously complex narrative that the author completely pulls off—the story is split between DJ’s first-person memoir and a third-person account of Kelly’s search for him, and both strands are emotionally wrenching. Without indulging in an excess of luridness, Atreides unflinchingly paints a chilling picture of childhood abuse and domestic violence, and the wounds both leave. The subject matter is often discomfiting—this is not a breezy read—but the novel is worth the disquiet it produces.

A moving account of abuse and the difficulty of recovery.