University of Nebraska Press, 320 pages, $21.95 (c2021)
This is a special book and it is a mystery, but the emphasis is on character development. And on setting. And on plot. It’s everything done well.
It won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.
If you have grown up in a small town, maybe this book will strike a particular resonance with you. Everybody is up in everybody else’s business. Everybody, it seems, gossips, even the most saintly sometimes. Not that Alma Costagan is saintly and she hates gossip.
Alma still sees herself as a Chicago girl. So what is this middle-aged woman with wrecked dreams of a large family doing in rural Nebraska, helping to run a farm? She married Clyle — that’s not a typo of “Clyde” — who wooed Alma at college and worked for IBM in Chicago. When Clyle’s widowed mother became ill, he and Alma shut down their lives in Chicago, temporarily they thought, to help with the family farm in Nebraska. Even after his mother died, Clyle was still drawn to the small-town life he had always treasured and the hard farm work in which he found satisfaction. Alma thought she could adjust. Fifteen years later, she is pretty tired of trying to adjust. Alma speaks her mind and, as an ex-social worker, tries to help others. Blunt and in-your-face.
Hal is the person Alma has silently chosen for her project. Because of a swimming accident that occurred when he was two — due to the negligence of his careless mother — Hal has a diminished intellect. Clyle and Alma have taken him under their wing. He helps with chores around their farm and when he was younger he slept in their house. They’ve been helping him mainstream, but that has its limits. On the outside, Hal seems normal, even somewhat attractive. Many a woman has flirted with him, only to be dismayed at his inability to maintain a social interaction.
Peggy Ahern is a 17-year-old next-door neighbor of the Costagans. She is smart, pretty, popular, and testing life on the wild side in Gunthrum, Nebraska, the latter on the sly, of course. Her 12-year-old brother Milo, also smart, knows she sometimes disappears late at night to meet up with her friends to party. In contrast, Milo follows the rules, is a good friend, tries to fly beneath the radar. He is the quiet to his sister’s loud. Surprisingly, they are mostly friends. Here’s a snippet about them:
For a twelve-year-old nerd and a volleyball-playing cheerleader, they had more in common than others might expect, and a lot of their time was spent talking about the days they’d leave for college, their Podunk years in Gunthrum behind them.
We mostly view the book by hanging out with Alma and Milo, although sometimes we follow Clyle. it is through their interactions with each other and the town that we view the disappearance of teenage Peggy one cold night.
At first, no one can find Peggy. Her parents pretend she has run away in a youthful escapade. Milo half believes she has done just that, to begin her life in the bigger world, but she wouldn’t have left without telling him. It is Milo who first reckons with the fact that she is probably dead. To her family, other people mouth platitudes and wildly optimistic predictions for Peggy’s return.
Sheriff Peck Randolph has never had to deal with this kind of case before. He is a big and stolid presence in Gunthrum, and knows when to pull back and when to push the locals with their wrongdoing. It doesn’t help that Peggy’s family doesn’t alert his office until she has been gone awhile.
Mistaking a flirty move by Peggy one day at a picnic, Hal develops a crush on Peggy. He is twenty but does not understand adult interactions. He is besotted, and this is what eventually gets him into trouble. Peggy is gone; Hal must be responsible. The town’s focus has almost unanimously focused on Hal. Big, hot-tempered (because he can’t understand some situations), and with a dimming bulb, Hal cannot understand why people suspect him. He doesn’t even understand that people suspect him! It doesn’t help that when asked what he was doing the night of Peggy’s disappearance, it turns out he was in the vicinity of where she was last seen. When Alma and Clyle ask if he hit Peggy with his truck, Hal hems and haws and says he doesn’t think so.
That is the mystery in a nutshell. But the book is about so much more.
Using Peggy’s disappearance as a vehicle, author Erin Flanagan explores the dynamics of small town justice. People are guilty until proven innocent. Past behavior haunts families for generations. Alma now despises the people she once fraternized with when she first arrived. She no longer wants to bake “the best” brownies, drink herself into a lost weekend at other people’s homes, play kissy-face with other men, or attend their sanctimonious churches. Everything would be more tolerable if she had been able to bring any one of her miscarried babies to birth. As we meet her, she is filling in this void with driving the school bus and mother-henning Hal. But her sharp tongue has turned people away from her and even her husband, once loyal, kind, and loving to her, has gone silent around her. What has she lost and does she want it back? Here’s a bit about their disintegrating marriage, “The list of what one person would never understand about another went on and on.” As Alma becomes more frantic in her desire to protect Hal, and then Milo, she draws her emotions in tight and trusts no one.
Poor Milo, who has not done anything wrong, is caught up in his family’s storm. With difficult parents and unwanted sympathy from the community, Milo feels under siege. Another kid says,
‘You don’t know-know because you’re twelve.’
Milo hated when people used that as an excuse. it was like people saying you’re a boy or from rural Nebraska. What did that have to do with anything?
Peggy’s disappearance coincides with the important family event of Milo’s confirmation at the Lutheran Church:
[Milo] thought about all the words he’d memorized for his confirmation, the oath he’d taken to God. Was that just another lie everyone told so they could get up in the morning? Were all these people who thought nothing bad could happen just fooling themselves?
What a fraught picture Flanagan paints of a community in crisis! There is a lot of finger-pointing and ill-based anger as the community fractures. Flanagan paints this so well. She tackles the thoughts of a 12-year-old and a middle-aged woman equally well. I almost thought Flanagan wasn’t going to solve the mystery. Other books have left things hanging, because, well, sometimes that’s real life.
MBTB star!
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