Reservation Road

by John Burnham Schwartz

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"A dark and irresistible miracle: a heartbreaking thriller."--Los Angeles Times

"Haunting. . . . A powerful and affecting novel."--The New York Times

A tragic accident sets in motion a cycle of violence and retribution in John Burnham Schwartz's riveting novel Reservation Road. Two haunted men and their families are engulfed by the emotions surrounding an unexpected and horrendous death. Ethan, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, is wracked by an obsession with revenge that threatens to tear his family apart. Dwight, a man at once fleeing his crime and hoping to get caught, wrestles with overwhelming guilt and his sense of obligation to his son. As these two men's lives unravel, Reservation Road moves to its startling conclusion. This is an astonishing tale of love and loss, rage and redemption, that is as suspenseful as it is emotionally compelling.

"Thrums with suspense and moral ambiguity. . . . This is one of those rare--very rare--novels that you don't so much read as inhabit and that makes everyday life seem altogether mysterious." --Entertainment Weekly

"A triumph . . . character-driven as it is, it reads like a thriller, swift and complete."--The New York Times Book Review

• ISBN10: 0375702733
• ISBN13: 9780375702730
• Publish Date: 5 October 1999 (first published 25 August 1998)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780375702730

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

After reading the book, the movie has come off my Netflix queue entirely. Because if the book is better, I can't take the movie. I knew it was going to be depressing going in based on what I knew about the plot: a young boy is killed in a hit-and-run car accident, and that accident has powerful reverberations on everyone involved. Obviously anything dealing with child death is going to be difficult material, but I used to read those Lurlene McDaniel books about teenagers with cancer on the regular, so surely I could handle it.

Turns out, not really. Not because it was too emotionally charged, but because it was boring and uncentered. The story is told in rotating chapters, varying perspective between Dwight (the driver that hits and kills ten year-old Josh), Ethan (Josh's father), and Grace (Josh's mother). The novel doesn't spend enough sustained time with any of the characters to really dig into them more than on a surface level: Dwight feels guilty, but not enough so to jeopardize his relationship with his own ten year-old son by turning himself in; Ethan feels impotent rage at his powerlessness in the situation, and Grace just withdraws from everything. I did find myself wondering why Grace was written in the third person while the men were written in the first person. Did Schwartz not feel comfortable writing first-person perspective for a woman? Is it supposed to be symbolic of her emotional deadening with grief, that she doesn't even have the willpower to view herself as the center of her own story anymore? I'm honestly not sure. None of the characters grows or changes, everyone just stays stuck in their patterns. Which is probably realistic, I can't even imagine what the process of mourning the loss of a child would be like and hope I never have to know. But it doesn't make for enjoyable or even very interesting reading.