Barrelhouse Reviews: How We Were Before by Jonathan Kravetz
Reviewed by Jacob M. Appel
Running Wild Press / May 2024 / 292 pp
Pete and Tara Blythe of Benfield, Massachusetts: on the far side of sixty, separated and reconciled, their quiet desperation yielding to a second spring of cozy, late-life harmony. Only this newfound tranquility is disrupted one December night by high school derelict Billy Lawson, who mistakes an ex-lover’s description of Tara’s glamour for a reference to hidden pecuniary wealth, and executes the sleeping couple during a robbery. These senseless killings launch Jonathan Kravetz’s innovative, kaleidoscopic account of the ways in which the Blythes’ deaths—narrated like a contrarian reimagining of It’s a Wonderful Life—transmute and fragment the lives of their children, their neighbors and the larger Benfield community.
The take-home message of Frank Capra’s beloved film is that George Bailey’s ordinary life was truly heroic, his impact extraordinary. Not so with the Blythes. After raising two daughters—neither of whom remain particularly engaged in their parents’ lives—and surviving countless arguments, infidelities, and even Pete’s years-long escapade with a mistress half his age, the couple settles into a comfortable routine of “morning walks, afternoon chores, after dinner talk, and then the inevitable.” Nothing about their lives make them pillars of their community, or even terribly important bricks in that community’s structure. And yet, as Tara’s best friend realizes after their deaths, “Pete and Tara were central players in her story, like William Powell and Myrna Loy in the old Thin Man movies; they were the stars around which the rest of the plot revolved.” That is also the plot that their murders unravel, stitch by stitch, like so much shabby embroidery.
The killings do not generate turmoil so much as abrade the veneer of stability that has long concealed chaos and yearning beneath. The couple’s older daughter, Shelby, finds herself drawn romantically to the reporter covering the case for a local newspaper, enlisting this young woman to help her correspond with her parents’ killer. The younger Blythe daughter, Samantha, pushes away her devoted husband, Carlton, who in turn stalks the town’s ex-police-chief-turned-drug-felon, Tim Pearson, responsible for inadvertently spurring Billy to murder. In the pages of How We Were Before, readers encounter Pearson’s preteen son, Louis, who escapes into comic book fantasies with his best friend, Andy, and later steals his father’s gun in a failed effort to protect his family. We race the alternate path pursued by Billy’s would-be accomplice, Barry Epstein, who backs out of the crime.
Many of the characters we meet have direct ties to either the killer, the victims, or both—such as Billy’s alcoholic mother, who concedes her son’s guilt to a journalist before seducing him. Others, although their links to the murders are more distant, still experience life-changing consequences in the aftermath. Among the latter are the nimbly imagined Wendy Watson, Shelby Blythe’s dance teacher, struggling to connect with a former high school classmate, now a janitor, whose own history of sexual abuse prevents him from consummating a date. Even Janey, a mentally ill homeless woman, finds her life turned upside down by delusions peripherally related to the crime.
Kravetz threads together this memorable tapestry of secondary victims, some more innocent than others, with the dexterity of a skilled weaver, stoking each of his wounded to life with pitch-perfect authenticity and compassion. In Kravetz’s expert hands, these hapless souls rise to find valor, even heroism, within their otherwise limited lives.
Yet How We Were Before is much larger than Benfield or the Blythes. The novel captures a pivotal moment in the fraying of a culture’s social fabric, a bookend to a distinctive New England literary tradition that arguably traces its roots to the community-exalting endeavors of Emerson and Longfellow. In recent generations, students of the Yankee novel have witnessed the final heyday of this cohesion in the works of John Cheever and Raymond Kennedy, then a nostalgic longing for this same lost community in blockbusters like Richard Russo’s Empire Falls and Jincy Willett’s Winner of the National Book Award. Kravetz’s modern-day Bay Staters are so adrift from this legacy that they no longer seek to reattach mooring lines. Like the real Americans depicted in the General Community Survey or Robert David Putnam’s Bowling Alone, his creations have resigned themselves to a world in which connection remains elusive and fleeting. Or, as the Blythes’ son-in-law sees it, “Life is a broken jaw, always aching.”
Fortunately, How We Were Before is not merely an exercise in sociological pessimism. Rather, Kravetz’s gift is his ability to transcend the rawness of that ache and to suss out the nascent embers of an alternative New England—more honest, more diverse, in some ways more welcoming—smoldering in the embers of Brother Jonathan.
Ron Miller, the cop accused of roughing up Billy Lawson during his arrest, embodies this newfound candor. He sees his role as community engagement, rather than merely law enforcement: the sort of officer who can buy a troubled kid lunch and help him find a job. As captain of his department’s recreational softball team, he bucks hidebound customs, attempting to recruit his own daughter, Edith, for an all-male match against a rival sanitation department. Yet Ron has lost touch with his daughter’s life to such an extent that he no longer knows she has quit her university’s softball team. When he learns that she has, he travels to Arizona to reconnect with her anyway, skipping the championship match in the process. For him, this decision is a personal one: an effort, ultimately successful, to reconnect with Edith. Yet to the knowing reader, who sees the full panorama of transformative social change, Ron is also ditching a perceived civic responsibility for a private, familial one—a step individually rewarding, but also symbolic in its rejection of traditional communal roles.
The “new” New England may not yet be ready to accept this vision. Ron finds himself reassigned to desk duty, checking IDs in the municipal courthouse. Yet his evolution, so deftly mapped by Kravetz, mirrors that of so many of the Benfield pioneers of How We Were Before.
In Benfield, maybe liberated by the murders, people finally say what they mean. Billy’s mother can give voice to her son’s guilt (“Of course he’s guilty. He shot them with that pistol his father bought him last year”) and her own isolation (“I’m lonely, Matt. Fuck. That’s why I want you to stay. Don’t read anything into it, okay?”) Nick, the impotent janitor, speaks frankly to Wendy, his one-time high school crush, of both his sexual abuse and his impairment, shattering taboos that had left her benighted for decades. The pair do not transcend this barrier, but at least they acknowledge it—in a manner seemingly impossible a generation before. The Blythes’ marriage, narrated in fragments between these interlocking subplots, follows a trajectory from the old New England of silent endurance toward a new one marked by efforts (however futile) to name, and occasionally to challenge, the obstacles to human intimacy. Kravetz renders this progress with nuance and insight.
Some readers of How We Were Before may enjoy the work as an inventive novel that plays with form while mining the emotions of characters at once unexpected and comfortingly familiar. Fiction that can achieve either one of these goals, let alone both, deserves to be relished. Yet How We Were Before is far more than just a spool of engaging yarns plaited into a magical arras. As both a gripping story and also a discerning exploration of the contemporary social landscape, Kravetz’s novel is a fine read for anyone who has ever explored New England’s country towns and rocky farmsteads from the safety of their local library—for all of us who have savored adventures in fields of heirloom corn and seas of steamers and scrod without leaving the hearths of our own imaginations.
Jacob M. Appel MD is the author of Einstein’s Beach House and treasurer of the National Book Critics Circle. More at www.jacobmappel.com.