Trouble

March 31, 2008
Tautly constructed, metaphorically rich, emotionally gripping and seductively told,Schmidt’s (The Wednesday Wars
) novel opens in the 300-year-old ancestral home of Henry Smith, whose father has raised him to believe that “if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” With such an opening, it is inevitable that Trouble does find the aristocratic Smiths: Henry’s older brother, Franklin, is critically injured by a truck. A Cambodian refugee named Chay, who attends the same school as Franklin, acknowledges responsibility, but over the course of Chay’s trial it occurs, to Henry at least, that it was Franklin who sought Trouble: the racism he directed toward Chay specifically and Cambodian immigrants generally has been so widely shared in the community that no one challenged it. Twin sequences of events plunge the Smiths and Chay into further tragedy, also revealing the ravages of Chay’s childhood under the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, a storm exposes a charred slave ship long buried on the Smiths’ private beach: it emerges that their house has been close to Trouble all along. For all the fine crafting, the novel takes a disturbingly broad-brush approach to racism. Characters are either thuggish or willfully blind or saintly, easily pegged on a moral scale—and therefore untrue to life. Ages 12-up.

Teenaged Henry's trouble-free existence is shattered when his brother, Franklin, is hit and killed by a car driven by Cambodian refugee Chay Chouan, who is Henry's schoolmate. In his grief Henry decides to head to Mt. Katahdin, in Maine, which he and Franklin had planned to climb together. With a rescued dog and his best friend, Sanborn, Henry sets off to come to terms with what has happened. Jason Culp does a stunning job creating the troika of characters. Henry is trying to make peace with the world. Sanborn, a sardonic rich kid, is fiercely loyal to Henry. Chay, the refugee, is a little too noble to ring true, but his accent and emotions are entirely believable. Culp's timing and tone brighten the humor and darken the grief. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine