Carry the One
By Carol Anshaw
Simon & Schuster, 3/2012
carolanshaw.com
Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen’s wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidently hits and kills a girl on a dark, country road. For the next twenty-five years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, connect and disconnect and reconnect with each other and their victim. As one character says, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.” (Publisher Marketing)
Having just finished this novel and finding myself full of complex emotions over it’s content and it’s structure, the most real thing I can say about it is that I feel reborn, cleansed, and forgiven. I also feel like I’ve been given a precious gift.
There was a moment in the middle of my reading experience when I though perhaps I wasn’t going to like it. I lean toward action and drama, and this is a subtle, expressive winding between time and characters. There’s a melancholy to all of them, trapped as they are by shared tragedy, and as they grow and change over time their struggles are always overshadowed by their internal guilt over a young girl who will never grow up. Other than the driver–who is a minor character–the characters are not punished legally and instead form their own punishments over time. Alice–again being the best example–spends her life painting portraits of the imagined lost life of this girl, portraits that always surpass the beauty of the other works she does.
But their personal punishments are not the what I loved most, rather the way each of these methods of dealing with the past intertwines with the others–forming an amazing picture of reactions and dependencies. The interrelations of three siblings that form the core of the novel are very well described; complex and rich without being cliched or obvious. You feel perhaps that they are all family members of the author, she catches their foibles and friendships so well and there are so many slight surprises.
The other aspect that made me love the book: the slicing through time. Much like in another of my favorite books The Good Wife by Stewart O’Nan, Carol Anshaw is dipping us in and out of the time stream the characters are traveling through capturing a large span of time by focusing on very small moments. Each chapter could be days or years later than the previous and you spend a very pleasurable short time figuring out how much time has passed and what important things have happened. Whole swathes of characters lives are encapsulated in one short scene and presented to the reader through beautiful minutia, and you find yourself there for just the definitive moments. It may be the definitive moment as in when a fire cracker takes off an ear, or it just be the moment that a character realizes they are no longer in love. Either way it will be incredibly important and beautifully rendered.
