Her husband leaves her for another woman, and it’s evident that he has never really forgiven her for that night. Thick and delicious, they fill every crevice inside you.’’Ĭarmen is the most sympathetic voice, in her life as mother and activist. Most people think drugs just waste your time and screw up your life. There were three cars waiting, parking lights on, radios laying a drift of melody on the heavy summer night air. On a camping trip with her, he ends up where he always does, “in the deserted lot of a defunct Midas Muffler shop. Years later, after Olivia has left prison and they are married, he cannot stay away. He’s brilliant at astronomy, getting into graduate school by 19, but even by the night of the accident, his true love is drugs. Nick feels the most guilty, having let Olivia serve time for the murder, and his attempts to make amends to the dead girl’s family are disastrous, resulting in a broken nose and more shame.

Trace elements of blackstrap molasses, tahini, apples, and dirty socks were also in the mix.’’Īlice spends her life painting the child, but doesn’t show these pictures for years, even though she’s become a famous artist. The room sighed out its own smell - a blend of burnt wood and wet clay. In that farmhouse where the wedding party is winding down, it’s 1983 and a messy rural artists collective: “A fat fly idled around the open window amid dangling pieces of stained glass. It’s not “plates spinning in the air,’’ as some writers say, or a “kaleidoscope of scenes.’’ This is more like a series of intricate, perfectly illustrated dioramas called The National History of the Kenney Family After the Accident.Īnd that could be because Anshaw is also a painter. The plot, which dives in and out of 25 years in the Kenneys’ lives, does not come in neat increments or even chapters that feel the necessity of traditional arc. Carol Anshaw takes chances from the first moments of the novel, her fourth book.

“Carry the One’’ is a brilliant feat of storytelling, a total immersion into a family deeply injured, fractured, wounded in every way by a tragic death that occurs after the last truly happy, free moment in the lives of three siblings: a backyard wedding in rural Wisconsin in the early 1980s.

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw