Before Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins there was Douglas Kennedy, the original maestro of “family noir”. For the past two decades Kennedy has been entertaining readers with barrelling novels in which a parent, sibling or spouse is often the devil in disguise. His latest, The Great Wide Open, takes him to the extremes of this sinister subgenre.
The prologue introduces us to Alice Burns, a successful book editor in Reagan-era Manhattan as she deals with sloppy prose, turning 30 and a complicated sex life. Her relatives are hardly a help. Visiting one of her brothers in Otisville correctional institution, she uncovers some unsavoury home truths, setting the tone for almost 600 pages of deception and betrayal.
The Burnses are more a Venn diagram of grievances than a nuclear family. One of Alice’s brothers is a rampant capitalist, the other a leftwing firebrand. The dinner table can turn into a “Tourette’s convention”. Alice describes them as “a quintet of Americans from the upper reaches of the middle class. And a testament, – in our own disparate, tortured ways – to the mess we make of life.”
The narrative tracks back to Alice’s high school years in the early 1970s. Her home town of Old Greenwich on the Connecticut coast is an “obedient and unadventurous” neighbourhood with one coffee shop and complacent policemen. What at first seems like a coming-of-age tale in the leafy climes soon curdles into a missing person’s case. Her friend Carly disappears, her clothes found on a local beach. A body is never discovered.
This mystery casts a shadow over Alice’s college years in Maine until other issues intrude: an over-friendly professor; an exam-cheating scandal; a wayward frat-boy lover. Her coping mechanisms – avoidance, alcohol, travel – are well observed. As Alice acknowledges: “In the wake of bad judgment and self-sabotage, we so often rewrite the scenario to create one that we can live with.”
Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by global affairs. Alice’s student problems are overshadowed by her father’s murky business affairs in Chile. She spends her days worried about Pinochet’s goons as much as her poetry assignments. And when she runs away to spend a sandwich year at Trinity College Dublin, the Troubles come to her. The misadventures of the American abroad is a regular Kennedy theme (previous novels have seen his narrators hide out in back streets of Berlin, Paris, even Putney). It’s usually well handled, but this Irish interlude veers uncomfortably into grand guignol territory.
This sprawling opus opens with André Malraux’s maxim: “Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.” In his early books, such as The Big Picture and The Job, Kennedy delivered taut tales of men undone by their secrets. But after the huge success of The Pursuit of Happiness, in which his female protagonist is laid low by love and McCarthyism, he has been recast as a romantic author.
It’s a marketable strategy but doesn’t play to the author’s strengths. Alice’s treacly love life, a litany of breathless praise gasped over pillows, hobbles a book that should be half its length. The book also suffers from some editing slips (several Connecticut place names are spelt wrong).
There remains much to enjoy, however. The contrast between the cosy shingle shacks of Maine and the “mildewed chill” of Dublin is amusing. As is the 1970s detailing – stoner lifeguards, aerograms, tumblers of Dubonnet and ice. But Kennedy should take heed of one of his characters. “Don’t be afraid to suggest serious reworking of a manuscript,” Alice’s boss advises her when she joins a publishing house.
• The Great Wide Open by Douglas Kennedy is published by Hutchinson (£20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
