CRUSTACEANS

One man’s litany of loss, told in a letter to a son already perished.

Paul has three losses to confront: his mother; his son Euan; and then Ruth, Euan’s mother. From the start, we know that all three are gone and that Paul is driving back to the seashore where they used to gather. Tension comes from flashbacks about Paul’s upbringing in a motherless family (how did she die? he is always asking), about his courtship with Ruth, and about how Euan came to be and then not to be. That the memory of Euan is all Paul has left seems intended as the emotion to keep us buoyant, but as a narrative device it’s not as strong as it needs to be: These clipped remembrances may be meant to create sadness, but too often they come off like the monotone of a math teacher delivering theorems. And the tone, too, is out of sync with the recounting of happy times: Would a young father, in a letter to a dead son, refer so often to his own sexual arousal, his erections, his fixations with Ruth’s breasts, all as though these were the saddest of things? By the time we know how everyone has died or vanished, the sorrow has become a drain and Paul has become a friend you can no longer comfort: he needs to snap out of it, maybe seek help. British author Cowan (Common Ground, 1997, etc.) tries to save him, but only early does the prose ring true for his character: “And when she visits today . . . she can take whatever else remains in the house, if that’s what she wants. She knows now where I’ve come. The patch is still here in my pocket, and I can’t give it away, can’t pass it on. It is all that is left to me, all I shall keep, and like the love it is useless.”

Accomplished but deadening. Better would be Prozac and some therapy.