LEAVING THE WORLD
Douglas Kennedy
Hutchinson, $36.99, pbk
I have read and enjoyed other books by Douglas Kennedy, especially The Big Picture, with its gripping suspense (featuring a bottle of our own Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc as the murder weapon), and the highly readable The Pursuit of Happiness.
In The Pursuit of Happiness, his narrator was a woman and I was impressed by the ease with which he inhabited her persona. In his latest novel, his narrator is again a woman. Here, too, he achieves an authentic portrayal, but not a particularly sympathetic one.
Jane Howard is a clever academic, a professor of English. She was an only-child, emotionally scarred by the break-up of her parents' marriage, which her mother attributed to a remark an adolescent Jane made at the dinner table.
Bearing this false burden of guilt, she protects herself with a cool reserve, which makes it difficult to empathise with her as she experiences a series of personal disasters and, at times, makes decisions regarding them that tried my patience as a reader.
Kennedy likes to inform his readers on a variety of topics and causes. Placing his main character in an academic world gives the author plenty of chances to sprinkle the text with his knowledge of literature.
The men in Jane's life provide further scope for him to exhibit what he knows about movies and music.
Then there is an interlude in her working life where she works for a hedge fund and the cutthroat world of high finance is exposed. While providing interesting background, this tendency can slow the action and might frustrate some of his readers.
In the last third of the book, Jane's life takes such a turn for the worse that she decides to leave all that is familiar: hence the title.
The final few chapters are a sudden departure from what has gone before. But it is not until then that the writer's reputation for developing page-turning suspense is fully justified.
- Patricia Thwaites is a retired schoolteacher.
