Let's set aside any plausibility issues that might arise from the first scene in Lawrence novelist Laura Moriarty's new book, While I'm Falling (Hyperion). It's fiction, after all, so we have to just go with this opening, in which the too-predictable life of a Johnson County family is wrecked when the attorney father returns early from "a two-day seminar on financial planning" to find a roofer in his bed.
Our house was on a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Kansas City that is known for its safety, excellent public schools, and complete lack of public transportation; still, my father said that for far too long, he truly perceived the man as some kind of confused, unshaven transient who had broken in to take a mid-morning nap.It takes a few minutes -- and the discovery of a love note to the roofer from his wife -- for the attorney-father to figure out what has happened. For him, this is because his wife Natalie's infidelity is unfathomable; for a reader, this opening is difficult for reasons that have more to do with Moriarty's artistic choices. Yes, the roofer is a shockingly out-of-place character in a bedroom on this cul-de-sac, so he serves the plot well. Someone has to destroy this marriage, after all. But this particular roofer, we find out much later, was a lit major in college, has a master's degree and did his thesis on Nabokov. He's a roofer whose inquiry about the books on Natalie's shelf is pretty much all it takes to get the attention-starved suburban housewife in the sack.
Veronica has made it through her cul-de-sac childhood and first two years of college unscarred by any real emotional, social, physical or spiritual turmoil. Now, though, it's the fall semester of her junior year, and she's tumbling toward the first Christmas since her parents' divorce. It's a perfect time to make a series of bad decisions.
Veronica is too smart to accept a ride from a semi driver, no matter how bad the Kansas ice storm. And no matter how much she's had to drink, she knows better than to allow a party in the immaculate apartment of the scary, nose-ring-wearing reputed drug dealer who has asked her to house-sit. Of course, she does these stupid things anyway, piling on other screw-ups while the dorm drama escalates.
It's hard to shake the feeling, though, that lots of college kids must do dumber stuff, learn harder lessons, discover deeper things. Eventually, when Veronica risks her relationship with her perfectly nice boyfriend by drunkenly flirting with the dorm's hottest dude (who has an inexplicable crush on her), everyone might be more satisfied if she just dumped the boring Tim Culpepper and went ahead and had sex with Third Floor Clyde. And that incongruous pre-med major? Drop it, already! Who cares what your career-obsessed father thinks! Of course you want to switch to English.
Providing the only real surprises in this soap opera is Veronica's mother, Natalie. There's an early danger that Natalie will be as superficially drawn as that roofer, but as the pages turn, the passages in which she appears are ultimately the most caricature-free, the most human. She allows us to re-imagine the Johnson County housewife.
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