Blame

My book club chose Blame by Michelle Huneven for its May selection.  It is an intense character study of a woman who must deal with the consequences of an unimaginable act. History professor Patsy MacLemoore wakes up in jail, again, after a long night of drinking with no memory of what has happened. Police officers inform her that she hit and killed a mother and daughter in her own driveway while driving with a revoked license. She is consumed by guilt and eventually pleads guilty to the charges and goes to prison for several years. While there, she joins AA and gets sober to show the victim's husband how remorseful she feels. Once released, she is determined to be "good" in an attempt to assuage her guilt.  She gives much of her salary to the victim's son to pay for college and law school, volunteers at an AIDS hospice, and marries a much older man, whom she meets at an AA meeting, because he is "safe." Twenty years later she is a caretaker to an elderly husband, with whom she has nothing in common, and is forced to share her home with a rotating group of AA members being "saved" by her husband and his grown children and grandchildren, who are always in crisis.  She is obviously unhappy but feels she deserves to be so, even rejecting a chance at happiness with a colleague who sweeps her off her feet.  Out of the blue, Patsy receives new information about the accident which calls into question her culpability. This changes everything she believes about herself and sends her reeling. The story builds very slowly (I was especially struck by the minutiae of daily life in prison) but Huneven takes us deep within Patsy's psyche and we come to understand her pain intimately.  In fact, the whole strength of the book comes from all of the memorable and well-developed characters rather than from the story itself.  The plot twist requires the suspension of disbelief and the ending is a bit too ambiguous for me. However, I recommend this book because I really love the theme of redemption. Sometimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself.

Note:  Huneven does not use quotation marks for dialogue. I really hate this trend in contemporary literature because, in my opinion, it makes reading unnecessarily difficult. There were many times when I found myself re-reading passages because they didn't make sense, only to discover that they contained direct quotes.