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The End of the Day

Review

The End of the Day

Bill Clegg, the highly acclaimed and bestselling author of DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY, returns with THE END OF THE DAY, a complex and layered, but deeply emotional novel about a long-hidden secret and the year that the truth finally comes to light.

As he did in his fiction debut, Clegg kicks off his second novel by introducing three seemingly disparate characters, and then slowly tightening the narrative around them. First we meet Dana, a stick-thin, fashionable and highly demanding heiress with a briefcase full of secrets. She is dead set on tracking down her childhood best friend, Jackie, a retired widow with two adult children. Just as Dana sets off from her New York apartment for the suburbs of Connecticut, Lupita, a 67-year-old taxi driver in Hawaii, receives an unexpected phone call from the daughter of her recently deceased estranged sister. While it is not immediately clear what these women could possibly have in common now or even 50 years ago, Clegg writes sharply drawn vignettes of their present-day lives and their traumatic pasts, circling around them and pulling their ties tighter and tighter until an explosive secret emerges.

"THE END OF THE DAY is an intricately plotted and difficult-to-describe novel, but as he did in DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY, [Clegg] succeeds in weaving together characters, storylines and histories for something far greater than the sum of its parts."

Through flashbacks to their childhoods, we learn that Dana was always wealthy and spoiled, but (perhaps unexpectedly) delighted in the company of her best friend, a real middle-class girl named Jackie. Spurred by Dana’s desires and Jackie’s need to keep up, the two build their own little world within Dana’s hidden but expansive home and charge homecoming dresses, bedspreads and more to Dana’s family account. As we watch them grow as friends and young women, Clegg also introduces the Lopezes, Mexican immigrants who support Dana’s family in both their Manhattan apartment and their country home. Closest in age to the girls is the youngest Lopez daughter, Lupita, a brilliant and caring young lady who is often thrown into the center of her family’s struggles as members of the working class living among the privileged.

Although they come from vastly different backgrounds, the three girls’ lives are intertwined as children and as teens. Clegg offers readers several emotionally taut vignettes of fancy dinners, childhood bullying and high school crushes to illustrate how simply --- and often dangerously --- their lives twisted and revolved around one another’s. Each snapshot is rife with nuance, heavy themes of socioeconomic class and even an atmospheric sense of time.

As the connection among the women becomes clear, Clegg throws entirely new characters into the mix: Hap, a man who is watching his estranged father die in a hospital, and Hap’s mother, Alice, who is caring for Hap’s newborn daughter. Once again, it is not immediately clear how they are connected to Dana, Jackie and Lupita, yet Clegg has earned his readers’ trust enough to make the journey doubly satisfying. THE END OF THE DAY is an intricately plotted and difficult-to-describe novel, but as he did in DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY, he succeeds in weaving together characters, storylines and histories for something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Clegg writes with the fluidity of a far more experienced writer, and his ability to evoke time and place and accurately capture the social and economic rulings of any era is nearly unmatched. That said, THE END OF THE DAY is a highly ambitious novel, and I fear that the plotting did not always live up to the prose.

Juggling several characters is never easy, and though Dana, Jackie and Lupita are obviously, factually, very different, I struggled to keep their stories separate through at least the first third of the book --- a bit too long to develop an emotional attachment to any of them. Each woman is hiding a secret, and none of them are entirely blameless for what happened all those years ago. To his credit, Clegg does not strive to make excuses for any of his characters, nor shield his readers from their most unattractive qualities, which is a commendable decision. However, it did make it difficult for me to find someone to root for, a character to whom I could latch on and depend on as the backbone of the novel. Lupita comes closest, for it is she who suffers the most, but even she seemed just out of reach.

Clegg is known for his ability to write affecting, resonant relationships and bring together wildly different types of characters in believable ways. THE END OF THE DAY is all about these sort of complicated bonds, and though he succeeds about half the time, I found many of the relationships in the novel to be too intricate. I enjoy character-driven books with multiple perspectives, but I had to reread some passages to understand exactly how one character knew another. It certainly would have spoiled the plot, but still I longed for a family tree.

Nevertheless, Clegg remains a brilliant and skillful writer, and his unmatched emotional acuity means that I definitely will be reading whatever he writes next.

Reviewed by Rebecca Munro on October 2, 2020

The End of the Day
by Bill Clegg

  • Publication Date: May 18, 2021
  • Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction
  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press
  • ISBN-10: 1476798214
  • ISBN-13: 9781476798219