BITTERROOT

In Vitello’s novel, a young widow grapples with an attack on her family.

The small former mining town of Steeplejack rests at the foot of Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains. It’s there that Hazel Zapf was raised, and where she returns after some years away to marry her high school sweetheart, Ethan Mackenzie, and work as a forensic artist. “I draw dead and maimed bodies for a living,” Hazel puts it simply. Of Japanese descent on her mother’s side, Hazel likens the work to the tradition of Kusôzu, “the practice of capturing the beauty of a posthumous body’s organic decomposition. It serves as a meditation on impermanence and transcendence.” When, a few years into their marriage, Ethan is killed in a car accident, Hazel’s first impulse is to draw his body, there in the morgue, as a way of processing the loss. Soon after Ethan’s death, Hazel finds herself playing landlord to Corinda Blair, the surrogate mother of her gay twin brother’s baby, a woman she has despised since high school. When that brother, Kento, is shot at the baby’s gender reveal party by the surrogate’s estranged husband, Hazel finds herself at the center of a trial that unleashes a flood of racism and resentment against her family that has been building for generations. Might the rediscovered letters of her great-grandfather, a Japanese American veteran whose family was interned during the Second World War, provide a lesson on how Hazel should move forward? Vitello’s crystalline prose elegantly captures the numbing grief that grips Hazel for much of the novel. Here she describes her own awareness of it as she focuses on building a house in the aftermath of Ethan’s death: “Even as the new house took shape, I remained frozen. Inert as a slug during summer’s drought. The folks at Grief Group had finally stopped calling, and one day, I woke up to the realization that if I kept pushing folks away, I would, soon, be peopleless.” These memorable characters nimbly embody the larger cultural forces at war in contemporary America.

A gripping and emotionally intelligent tale of resentment and loss.