Say This
Two Novellas
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Two crystalline novellas linked by one devastating crime: Say This is an immersive meditation on the interplay between memory, trauma, and narrative.
It’s a cold spring in Baltimore, 2018, when the email arrives: the celebrity journalist hopes Eva will tell him everything about the sexual affair she had as a teen with her older cousin, a man now in federal prison for murder. Thirteen years earlier, Lenore-May answers the phone to the nightmare news that her stepson’s body has been found near Mount Hood, and homicide is suspected. Following Eva’s unsettling ambivalence towards her confusing relationship, and constructing a portrait of her cousin’s victim via collaged perspectives of the slain man’s family, these two linked novellas borrow, interrogate, sometimes dismantle the tropes of true crime; lyrically render the experiences of grief and dissociation; and brilliantly mine the fault lines of power and consent, silence, justice, accountability, and class. Say This is a startling exploration of the devastating effects of trauma on personal identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Levine (The Wicked Tongue) delivers a harrowing pair of novellas recounting the aftermath of a murder. In "Eva Hurries Home," the 41-year-old title character gets the first of several emails from a famous journalist living in Washington State. He wants to talk about Eva's relationship with her cousin, Duane, now in prison in Oregon for kidnapping and murder 13 years earlier. Eva agrees to visit her cousin, and their encounter skids her across memories of their unhappy, volatile childhoods, which at one point involved a sexual relationship. The details aren't clear to the reader, but the pain they cause her is. "Son One" follows Adrian, the man Duane kidnapped and robbed before killing him; it's narrated by four of Adrian's relatives, beginning with Lenore-May, Adrian's stepmother, as the characters relive the news of his death, the trial itself, and its impact on their own families. Old wounds open up as they try to understand: "You can't live the rest of your life missing someone who's not there," Lenore-May says. Though less coherent than the first entry—the characters' relationships to one another are not always clear—the second manages to sharply convey the jarring effect of an unexpected death on a family. It's a little wobbly, but it still packs a punch.
