Fate and suburban love
Accidents bookend Karma Brown’s new book In This Moment — a fitting metaphor that allows her to take us on a journey through the impact fate has on love, life and friendship.
At the end of Brown’s deeply affecting new novel, the heroine, a middle-aged woman named Meg, visits the site of a horrific accident that cost the life of her best friend Paige, when she was just 15 years old.
It was an adolescent trauma Meg successfully sublimated for decades until another horrific accident — this one opens the book — upends her life and sets in motion a series of events that fractures the tranquility of her suburban Boston life: a seemingly happy marriage to a successful doctor, a flourishing career as a realtor, mother to an alpha daughter named Audrey and a best friend with whom she, seemingly, has no secrets.
This life instantly shatters when Meg mistakenly waves a 15-year-old boy onto oncoming traffic which leaves young Jack Beckett paralyzed from the waist down. In a moment, two lives — Jack’s and Meg’s — change irredeemably.
Overwhelmed with guilt for putting the teenager in harm’s way, Meg begins having nightmares about the earlier accident, one she always believed was partially her fault.
But Meg’s true nightmare begins when Jack’s father, Andrew, turns to her for support in the wake of his son’s accident, and the two bond over the tragedy, putting at risk her marriage, family and her own moral compass.
In an era when Fifty Shades of Greyhas become the benchmark for the sexually illicit romance, In The Moment is much more innocent — its plot revolves around a simple conundrum: what ensues when a man and a woman with other marital partners cross a sexual Rubicon — and simply kiss as a prelude to much more.
The central theme of this modern morality tale is simple: how to forgive yourself and forgive others when things screw up.
Literary titans such as Updike and Cheever have brilliantly trodden this path of suburban sexual/emotional angst before. Karma Brown now impressively joins their ranks. Robert Collison is a Toronto writer and editor.