Leaving the World

April 12, 2010
Published to acclaim in the U.K. and France in 2009, Kennedy’s ninth novel is a complex study of a line early in the book: “nobody gets away lightly in life.” On the morning after narrator Jane Howard’s 13th birthday, her father, citing Jane’s comment that “No one’s actually happy,” walks out on the family. Jane shuts down emotionally, but excels academically and while at Harvard begins an affair with her married thesis adviser, David, which ends four years later when he’s killed in an accident. Moving on from making big bucks in finance, Jane ends up teaching at a third-tier university in Boston where she falls in love and has a daughter with film archivist Theo, who along with his new paramour, cheats Jane out of most of her savings. Life only gets harder, until, just when Jane is ready to give up, she gets involved in a child-murder investigation in Calgary, Canada. Jane is a quintessential heroine who never makes excuses or wallows in self-pity, despite her grief. Episodically structured yet with a strong narrative drive, this is a book with lasting impact: powerful, provocative, and tender.

Starred review from May 1, 2010
Appalled by her parents vicious fights, Jane Howard plans on having an independent and serene life. Brainy and determined, she secures a scholarship to Harvard, falls in love with her mentor, and suffers a bitter loss. Jane abandons academia to work for a hedge fund, only to find herself fleeing across Canada thanks to her fathers criminal activities in Chile. Jane regroups, becomes a university professor, and instantly antagonizes the administration. She falls in love with a decadent film maven who nearly destroys her, a toxic process completed by the cruel fate of their little daughter. Jane barely survives a suicide attempt, endures a purgatorial recovery while working in a library in Calgary, then turns sleuth and solves a string of sex murders. No matter how stealthily she tries to leave the world, the Web keeps her shackled to her harrowing past. Best-selling author Kennedy (The Woman in the Fifth, 2007) has created a shape-shifting hero, a brilliant, harrowed, and profane goddess who transcends every infernal trial. In this surging epic, a veritable decathlon of the spirit, Kennedy incisively dramatizes the enigma of chance, petty cruelty, and catastrophic evil, unalloyed grief, and the tensile strength concealed beneath our obvious vulnerability.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)