Reservation Road

by John Burnham Shwartz

Vintage, 292 pp., $13 (paper)

In Reservation Road, John Burnham Schwartz commits the mistakes of an inexperienced novelist. Despite a promising setup and minor poetry, Reservation Road ultimately fails to satisfy. The book opens with a boy’s death in a tragic hit-and-run car accident in the Northeast. The main protagonist Ethan teaches English at the nearby liberal arts college. His wife Grace works as a landscape architect. In turn, the couple must go through an inevitable (and interminable) healing process, retarded by the fact that the driver, Dwight — who has a son of his own and a story to tell — escapes almost without a trace. The result is a flaccid thriller that confronts psychological truths with literary platitudes: Bruised skies, blank walls of memory, and birthmark-like stains are meant to reflect the brutal world these characters inhabit. Unfortunately for Schwartz, better writers have already covered this terrain — Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter comes to mind.

This article appears in February 11 • 2000.

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