Lying with the Dead

August 17, 2009
Mewshaw (Year of the Gun
) tackles a dysfunctional Irish-American family in an emotional novel narrated by the three adult children: 60-year-old Candy, who reluctantly cares for their manipulative and gravely ill mother; the Asperger's-afflicted former convict, Maury, who went to jail at 13 for killing their father; and the successful, London-based actor Quinn. As they are called to mom's bedside, the nonlinear story travels back to the origins of this “radioactive” family, dredging up dark secrets. Candy, who contracted polio as a child and endured her mother's physical and verbal abuse, wants to marry and move to North Carolina. Maury is dealing with Asperger's syndrome, which renders him intolerant of people touching him; and Quinn, despite his success, is haunted by his familial past. The three jaded yet sympathetic voices of the siblings are darkly expressive, supplying unnerving comic moments and unexpected twists. Mewshaw waxes poetic throughout while keeping the story moving forward to its shocking conclusion.

September 1, 2009
A dying matriarch calls her children home to Maryland so she may confess her sins.

Multifaceted Mewshaw (Island Tempest, 2004, etc.) diverges from his usual crime-tinged stories for a full-on dysfunctional family drama that aspires to be a Greek tragedy but is in fact an exasperatingly malformed novel. The book's rotating narrators orbit around their dreadful mother, who has forever scarred them. The worst of the lot is preening, self-absorbed Quinn, who has fled the country to adopt a pretentious fa‡ade as a popular British character actor. He's happy to send money home but reluctant to respond to Mom's summons and risk losing an upcoming role in a BBC adaptation of the Oresteia, Aeschylus' trilogy about the cycle of violence within the House of Atreus. The family martyr is Candy, the dutiful daughter who stayed behind to take care of her dying mother at the cost of her own happiness."People insisted I was strong too because I stuck by Mom," Candy says."But I knew better. I knew I stayed with her out of weakness." The most tragic figure is poetic, sensitive Maury, afflicted by Asperger syndrome, who is also revealed to have spent 12 years in a maximum-security prison for murdering his father with a butcher knife. Now living in California, Maury reluctantly returns home to reunite with his siblings at their mother's deathbed. While Mewshaw demonstrates his usual skill at voicing unusual characters, his cast is so vile and unpleasant, particularly the chain-smoking, hateful (and never-named) Mom who drives the plot, that it's hard to sympathize with any of them.

The players are the weakest link in this bleak drama about bad blood, myths and the acrimony caused by truth.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2009
The author of 17 novels (e.g., "Island Tempest"), Mewshaw finds his latest inspiration in Greek tragedy. An elderly mother gathers together her three children: Quinn, who escaped the family to become a successful actor in London; Maury, who suffers from Asperger's syndrome and who served time in prison for murdering his father; and Candy, who at age 60 resents having to put off a chance for marriage to care for her mother in Maryland. Despite her age and failing health, their mother continues to wield Medea-like power over her offspring, and there are many references to the Oresteia, a story of murder and revenge in which Quinn is preparing to perform. While Candy and especially Quinn seem awfully whiny at first, they become more sympathetic as they roar against their unhappy childhoods. Especially effective is the climax, when we discover their mother's final request. And the multiple first-person points of view are interesting and distinct, especially that of Maury, who accepts his fate and tackles life one small step at a time. VERDICT Recommended for readers who love family dramas.Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2009
Mewshaw channels Aeschylus by way of Jerry Springer in this tale of three grown children reluctantly reunited to deal with the age-old question, What to do about Mom? Mom, however, is an evil amalgam of Joan Crawford and Granny Clampett, a chain-smoking, vile-tempered bundle of neuroses who has always been able to reduce her childrenCandy, Maury, and Quinnto cowering slaves through a lethal combination of physical and emotional abuse. At deaths door, she summons them all to her side so she can unburden herself of the darkest of secrets in a family that has never been exactly conversant with the light. In the process, she hopes to get one of them to do her biddingnamely, put her out of her misery. Theres logical precedence for her request: as a teenager, Maury was sent to prison for killing his father. Told through the viewpoints of each sibling, this is a macabre and mordantly satisfying satire of dysfunctional families.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)