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Ursula Hegi

THE WORST THING I’VE DONE

STONES FROM THE RIVER

THE WORST THING I’VE DONE
Ursula Hegi
Touchstone
Fiction
ISBN: 9781416543756

Annie drives at night, eating junk food and listening to talk radio psychologists. It’s no wonder, as her husband Mason has recently hung himself in her studio. Nor is this the first wrenching disaster Annie has had to deal with. On her wedding day eight years ago, her father and her pregnant mother both died in a car crash, leaving her and Mason to raise Annie’s baby sister Opal. But the young couple, who have known each other all their lives, rises valiantly and successfully to the occasion. Mason in particular is able to enter into a child’s world and jolly the fiery Opal out of her impetuous tantrums. But now Mason is gone, and Annie is left with Opal and her guilt over Mason’s death.

The third party to the adult triangle is Jake, who was always there --- the steady one, Mason’s best friend since childhood, hopelessly in love with Annie. Add a dose of compulsive jealousy on Mason’s part and a late night in a sauna, and you have the ingredients for the causal tragedy --- the worst thing they’ve done? --- that sets the scene for the novel.

Since we know so much so early, the only tension the novel provides is how Annie and Opal will muddle through the pain (and in Annie’s case, the guilt) of losing Mason. Ursula Hegi teases the reader with snippets of Mason’s long suicide note (presented in a different typeset) in between the chapters of the other characters’ points of view. And we hear from them all --- Annie, Opal, Aunt Stormy, a friend of Annie’s mother with whom they are staying, and eventually Jake. Annie is a collage artist, and the book itself is put together like a collage, with layers of each character for materials. The descriptions of Long Island and Aunt Stormy’s modest old house are lyrical and beautifully done. The sea, the plants and the wildlife all seem to be characters in the book, and they provide a welcome relief to the maudlin goings-on of the humans.

I confess to losing interest in the characters --- Opal, frankly, is a spoiled brat --- and much of the plot (for instance, the fatal parental accident on the day of their wedding) was hard for me to swallow. The liberties Hegi takes with points of view distracted me. Opal rarely sounds like an eight-year-old in her sections, and she relates scenes that happened when she was a baby as if she has total recall of them (did Annie really tell her the exact moment that Opal leaned back into Annie and Annie scratched her head?). Aunt Stormy, the wise and good earth-mother type, takes Annie along to protests against Bush and the Iraq War. I share their political views, but their presence in the book seems forced. At one point the kind Aunt Stormy gently straightens out a new protester who has brought a peace sign that looks like the Mercedes logo. Right.

At least Pete, Aunt Stormy’s great love who lives next door in his own house but sleeps in her bed, does not inflict his point of view. Fortunate because, due to a recent stroke, he talks like this: “Yes, but...I only find…things…I’ve stopped looking…for.” As a matter of fact, the punctuation gods have been extraordinarily generous with this book, which swims with ellipses, italics, different typesets and our good friend --- the dash.

Through it all Annie stubbornly refuses to see Jake or allow Opal to see him. After a couple of months, though, she acquiesces. Will she accept this kind, steady man already so implicated in her life and sad story? Will the salubrious effects of time and seashore and radio psychologists and art and patience grant Annie and Opal some peace? What, after all, is the worst thing Annie or Mason or Jake has done? If, like me, you loved STONES FROM THE RIVER, you may be put off by the soap opera quality of Hegi’s latest effort.

--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol

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