A Student of Living Things - Softcover

Claire's day of trouble is devastating. Her adored older brother, Steven, is gunned down -- assassinated, she believes -- on the steps of George Washington University. (One of the eerie pleasures of this novel is its invocation of familiar D.C. landscapes in a threatening time.) Steven was a political activist. The day he's killed, his op-ed protesting the counterterrorism tactics of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division runs in The Washington Post and a Department of Justice flag appears on the Frayns' front porch.

Shreve's novels are fairly conventional in terms of structure and language, but her subjects (the legacy of slavery, the changing face of feminism) are often provocative. Here, she makes the bold move of including the entire text of Steven's impassioned op-ed in an otherwise unusually domestic thriller.

Her style is brisk and engaging, even tantalizing, particularly in the first half of the book. An air of menace yields to a sense of anticipation as Claire seems about to crack open the mystery of her brother's death. She and her family are vividly drawn: Claire, a graduate student of biology, knows all about the natural world but has been curiously sheltered from men. Her father is a professor of medicine, who retreats nightly to a hangar in the back garden where he rebuilds antique planes; her mother, Julia, whose parents fled both Nazi Europe and Pinochet-era Chile, is angry and vibrant. The parental stories suggest the motif of flight, but their crowded little household in Bethesda is an extension of Julia's longing for community, and includes Claire's paternal uncle, maternal aunt, and cousin (who's lost a leg to a convenience-store bombing). Her aunt Faith works for the Civil Rights Division and, in an ominous moment, is fired the day Steven is murdered.

Most of the novel proceeds as a cross between a thriller and a murder mystery, and the suspense builds effectively. So, too, does anticipation that the novel's political concerns will reveal more than a plot twist. Claire joins forces with a friend of Steven's to track down the killer and is soon on the trail of a composer named Benjamin Reed, whose father, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, was Aunt Faith's boss at the Justice Department.

Claire writes to Benjamin, claiming that she too is a composer -- a ruse that yields one of the book's most surprising and inventive elements. As Claire begins to fall in epistolary love with Benjamin, the book begins to include the score of actual passages of music. Even musical illiterates will have no trouble picking up the mood, which is also described in dialogue. Less successful visually are a series of entries from Claire's childhood diaries. Though her biological observations in a childhood diary make for a good extended metaphor about how humans respond to disaster, some of the entries don't sound as if they were written by a child, not even a very precocious one. Nor do the line illustrations suggest a child's drawing. That's a shame, because it's a good idea to include graphics in a novel about learning to read the world anew, and rich biological illustrations might have played a bigger role throughout.

Illustrations, however, are often beyond an author's control, and what is fully in Shreve's control here is generally thoughtful and considered. But there's a curious moment midway through the novel when Claire reports that every time she drives her mother around Sheridan Circle, Julia reminds her "that a car bomb had exploded there, killing some important Latin Americans, maybe Chilean, maybe Argentinean -- she didn't know, and she didn't remember why they were important." It's inconceivable that anyone who fled Chile would not remember the 1976 assassination of the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronnie Moffitt. Is this an authorial slip, or a suggestion that Julia Frayn suppresses, or half-suppresses, political memories?

The question of suppressing politics arises again at the novel's end. As Steven's murder is solved, a troubling incident in the Frayn family history is finally confronted -- but the content of that op-ed that appeared the day he died is never fully discussed. It's confusing, too, and more than a little frustrating, to see Claire's aunt chatting so warmly with the assistant attorney general for civil rights who fired her so unfairly. Wise as Shreve is about family and forgiveness, I wish she had not abandoned the political issues she initially raised. Steven's murder may be solved, but Washington is still seething, and who better to confront the causes of unrest than a novelist as sharp as Shreve?

Reviewed by Valerie Sayers
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