BETWEEN HERE AND APRIL

Debut novel from TV producer and photojournalist Kogan (Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, 2001).

In the middle of a performance of Medea, Elizabeth Burns faints. Just before she passes out, she has a vivid, visceral recollection of April Cassidy—someone Elizabeth hasn’t thought about for 35 years. Once upon a time, they had been best friends, but April disappeared from Elizabeth’s memory just as completely as she disappeared from their first-grade classroom. After remembering this lost little girl, Elizabeth becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her. It doesn’t take long to discover that April’s mother, Adele, killed both her daughters and herself, but Elizabeth still wants to know why. As she begins to build her story, Kogan deftly exploits the conventions of the murder mystery to create a sense of tension and uncertainty, but the basic facts of the central murder are never in doubt. The mystery Elizabeth is exploring is the mystery of motive—which is, at its core, the essentially unknowable mystery of each human self. These opening chapters are eerie and gripping. A TV producer, Elizabeth uses her job as an excuse to exhume this long-buried tragedy, and, as she digs deeper, she uncovers unnerving parallels between her life and Adele’s. Both women are torn between career and motherhood, and both are unhappy in their marriages. Then she finds transcripts of Adele’s sessions with a psychiatrist, and the whole novel falls apart. These documents are about as nuanced—and about as convincing—as a dramatic reenactment on Unsolved Mysteries. Adele ceases to be a complex and tragically compelling figure and becomes, instead, a cartoonishly facile exemplar of postpartum psychosis. Elizabeth, too, devolves into a rickety collection of neuroses, and Kogan provides explanations for each that make it seem as if there is an obvious, inevitable connection between trauma and symptom. The ending is both predictable and absurd, and Kogan provides a coda that is so sentimental and improbable that it’s an insult to the reader.

Grossly disappointing.