Penitence

Lodgepole, Colorado, 2016: Nora, aged 13, has taken her father’s gun and shot her brother as he slept. Nico was fourteen and recently diagnosed with Huntington’s, an incurable condition that would shortly see him suffering from dementia. He was much loved by his parents but he was closest to his sister. She shot him three times and rang the cops to tell them what she’d done, and now she’s in a police cell facing a charge of Murder One.

There are few living characters in this story but a number of ghosts. The action plays back and forth between 2016 and 1991, and to begin with Nora is the pivot around whom everyone revolves: her parents, Angie and David, and her attorneys, Martine and Julian, mother and son – and there is the ghost from the earlier time: Diana, who is never absent.

Angie’s Italian grandmother doesn’t know her now but twenty five years ago poor demented Livia was a fierce matriarch, and Diana, her favourite granddaughter was alive - until Julian killed her on the ski slope, which was always Livia’s contention but everyone else thought she’d gone mad with grief.

 Only Julian and the reader know the facts of that winter’s afternoon when, with Angie, his teen age love, skiing fast and carelessly and on a high, he collided with Diana but agreed to Angie’s assertion that her little sister died after hitting a tree; Angie herself bearing the guilt of supplying the spliff, of ultimate neglect when she should have been watching out for a nine-year-old.

Although Livia’s insistence on Julian’s guilt was ascribed to grief his mother, Martine, knew better (somewhere, dropped in as if by accident, there is a suggestion that two fractured tibia sounds more like a ski collision than impact with a tree); she sensed culpability and connived with Livia to separate the lovers. Julian was sent away to college in New York while Angie stayed in Lodgepole.

But as soon as she graduated she followed him and, without either family’s knowledge, they embarked on a fiery relationship driven by passion and guilt and fuelled by alcohol. There is an air of atonement as Julian, as a junior defence lawyer, specialised in defending juveniles, usually black, always poor. He lost cases and lost heart while Angie was finding her feet as an abstract painter. Angie lived on the surface and for her New York absolved guilt. In Julian it was exacerbated until the day that she found him sprawled on a bar counter, dead drunk below a screen showing an endless loop of smoke and falling towers: 9/11.

Koval depicts that day with exquisite decorum. Since we all know as much as we need to know about it, and refuse to imagine more, there is a unique poignancy in absorbing it again from the point of view of a fictitious character. The little things: Julian fretting about his being late for a meeting as the subway train stops between stations and then starts to reverse. The long hot walk home across the crowded Brooklyn Bridge, women carrying their designer heels, trudging barefoot….

After she rescued him from that last bar Angie packed her paints, went home to Lodgepole and married David, a Park Ranger.

Beside Julian David appears a shadowy character: the solid rather stolid supporter always at hand when needed, loyal, unshakeable in his devotion to Angie since their school days yet never obtruding because she loved Julian. Now, shattered by the horror of 9/11 (supposedly knowing nothing of her liaison with Julian and its end) - only now can he support her in the most practical way. And it was a good marriage until Nico started to have difficulties with mobility, and he was diagnosed with Juvenile Huntington’s Disease.

After she was arrested and had confessed to the first cops on the scene Nora stayed mute, almost catatonic. Her speech returned gradually but she didn’t talk about the shooting, and never about her motivation. She didn’t know herself and had even speculated on the possibility that she had resented the attention accorded her brother in view of his condition – something that had occurred to Angie, when she was not adamant that the shooting had been a mistake.

Guilt pervades this story. It brought Julian south from New York to defend a child for a crime from which there is no defence in law, and he obtained a plea bargain that meant she would spend years of her 15-year sentence in a Juvenile Detention Centre rather than an adult prison. We have glimpses of Nora in the cell she shares with three other girls: transients who come and go; she looks almost serene, almost at home. Angie has forgiven her – and Angie, who nearly lost David after Nico died, has the key to his new house in her pocket, while in New York Julian’s new wife has a healthy baby. Wrongs have not been righted but they’ve been acknowledged and penance paid. You may not agree with some of it, indeed with any of it but the most remarkable thing about this fascinating novel is that it’s a debut. Koval is riveting.