Bright Before Us

February 21, 2011
Arnold-Ratliff's impressive debut explores an everyman's descent into madness, rendering his ungluing with a palette heavy in paranoia and disillusionment. Narrator Francis Mason, a young teacher in San Francisco whose second-grade class discovers a body while on a field trip to the beach, is hung up on memories of a whirlwind romance with his childhood soul mate, Nora, that followed her parents' death in a car accident. Meanwhile, his unhappiness in his marriage grows in intensity from neglecting and harboring a quiet disdain for his pregnant wife to erratic behavior and verbal abuse. Meanwhile, there's an increasingly amplified dissonance between what is (possibly) real and (possibly) imagined, particularly in relation to what happened at the beach, and soon paranoia sets in as Francis begins to believe his students' parents and the police are out to get him, despite indications that he's well liked. Arnold-Ratliff has a knack for juxtaposing familiar imagery (a classroom poster of Einstein with his tongue out) with startling description ("You looked like a Halloween costume of yourself, like your face was on crooked"), and despite the occasional forays into cloying breathlessness, Francis proves to be a formidable narrator, tough to crack and a morbid pleasure to observe.

March 15, 2011
In this first novel, beautiful sentences harshly illuminate the ugly decisions and heartless words of a floundering young man as he struggles to find clarity and meaning. Francis Mason faces the enormity of his future as he juggles impending fatherhood, a teaching career, and the burdensome weight of past choices. When he and his class of second-graders stumble across a dead body on a field trip, he begins a descent into warped half-truths that threaten to unravel everything by which he measures himself. In comparing his current wife with a past relationship he cannot seem to shake, he also reveals colossal flaws as he stumbles into a web of lies and toward painful self-reflection. Francis, unlikable and unreliable, is not easy to empathize with as he struggles to make the perilous journey from immaturity to integrity. Although Arnold-Ratliffs carefully polished narrative lacks the intensity and confusion of real life, her undeniably gorgeous prose and ability to launch troubled characters into impossible, tumultuous situations mark her as a writer to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)