The Center of Everything

Starred review from April 1, 2020
Despite various mysteries and suspicious deaths in this story about a Montana woman uncovering secrets past and present, Harrison wisely concentrates less on plot twists than on exploring the trickiness of memory where love and family are concerned. Over the course of a week in the summer of 2002, 42-year-old Polly, a married mother of two and sometime editor who helps her husband run his restaurant in Livingston, Montana, finds herself coping with several crises at once. Since a recent bicycle accident, Polly has struggled with memory problems, remembering too much as well as too little. As she prepares for a large family reunion to celebrate her great aunt Maude's 90th birthday, disjointed images of the past haunt her, and arguments with her mother, Jane--a highly successful historian who's written about "the eternal nature of stories"--about whether some of Polly's memories may be false, have exacerbated her fear of losing her mind. Meanwhile, her children's babysitter, Ariel, is missing and presumed drowned after a kayaking mishap. The tragedy involves Polly and the tight-knit Livingston community first in a search for Ariel, then in mourning, then in uncomfortable suspicions surrounding Ariel's kayaking companion and apparent boyfriend. Polly's emotional turmoil is the center of the novel as she fixates not only on Ariel's death, but also on what exactly happened in 1968, "when her world blew up." Another layer of understanding comes in chapters in which the 1968 events, extremes of joy and tragedy, are seen through Polly's limited 7-year-old perspective. The result is a kaleidoscope of facts and recollections that reveal emotional as well as factual truth only in tantalizing fragments. Some mysteries remain unsolved; others Polly solves, sometimes to her dismay. Through small moments, particularly shared meals and drinks, the reader becomes intimately involved in Polly's inner life and falls in love with a vividly portrayed Montana devoid of Western clich�s. A sharply intelligent, warmhearted embrace of human imperfection--the kind of book that invites a second reading.

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Starred review from October 19, 2020
An undercurrent of tragedy runs through Harrison’s brilliant latest (after The Widow Nash), about the effects of a brain injury on a 42-year-old Montana woman. Three months after a bicycle accident, Polly Schuster suffers from migraines and short-term memory loss, and has trouble concentrating on work at her husband’s restaurant. After family friend Ariel goes missing during a Yellowstone River kayak trip, Polly tells her mother, Jane, she remembers seeing four dead bodies by the time she was nine. Jane insists these are just “photographs turned into memories” after her accident, and gradually Polly begins to grasp why Jane is trying to mislead her. As Polly grows suspicious about Ariel’s disappearance, her world cracks open with revelations about the truth behind her family’s tragic past. A series of chapters set in 1968 reveal the sources of Polly’s memories, covering her childhood spent in Long Island living with her renowned archaeologist great-grandfather who moved east decades earlier, after Jane’s mother died in an accident on the Yellowstone River, and an incident involving a suicidal private plane crash. Against the backdrop of Polly’s family history and the author’s exploration of the vagaries of the human mind, Harrison plumbs complex family relationships and sheds insight on the power of memories and how they shape her characters. Harrison shines with passages of vivid imagery as Polly gains an added dimension of perception from looking at art and photographs. Readers will find themselves wishing this won’t end.

Starred review from November 1, 2020

In the summer of 2002, 42-year-old Polly is in the middle of a multigenerational, crisis-rich situation in Livingston, MT. Polly struggles with the after effects of a traumatic brain injury with the full support of her devoted husband, Ned; she and her family are also planning the upcoming 90th birthday of Great-Aunt Maude while a search party of townspeople continues to look for Ariel, the babysitter of Polly's children, who was in a boating accident and is now presumed dead. As the narrative deftly moves back and forth between Polly's current troubles and her childhood years in 1960s New York, rife with half-understood adult tragedies that engulfed her beloved grandparents, parents, and best friend, Edmund, old traumas resurface with stunning parallels. VERDICT In this exquisitely nuanced, beautifully constructed novel, Harrison ("Jules Clement" mystery series) draws the reader into young Polly's filtered understanding of her world, rich with happily married couples, vs. the uncertain reality of the adult Polly, coping with memory loss while slowly untangling shocking family secrets. A magnificent gem.--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2020
Polly Berrigan's mind has fractured. After falling off her bicycle, she sustained a head injury, causing her memories to splinter and fragment. Polly, who lives in rural Montana and runs a restaurant with her husband, tries to ignore her new, dreamy state. But when a local girl who babysits Polly's children disappears after a river rafting trip, Polly finds herself immersed in pieces of her old memories while also trying to puzzle out the circumstances of the tragedy. Told half in flashbacks to Polly's past and half in 2002, the story unearths a dread Polly has nearly forgotten: her proximity to death. Death truly is "the center of everything" in this lyrical, profound novel; Polly herself has survived, while many of her relatives and people close to her have not. While readers may feel at times as if they're meandering down that long, winding river, Harrison (The Widow Nash, 2017) reels them back in by the end, pulling Polly's memories together into a surprising ending. Recommended for book clubs and fans of complex, literary fiction.

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