USA TODAY International Edition
‘ The Fall of Lisa Bellow’ has new take on teen trauma
Abduction tale is less thriller, more character study
There are countless stories about tragic missing girls, the sweet high school beauties whose disappearances haunt fictional communities all over the world. But The Fall of Lisa Bellow ( Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., eegE), the new novel by Susan Perabo, is not about the abducted Lisa Bellow.
It’s about Meredith Oliver, her less popular eighth- grade classmate, who is traumatized when a masked gunman holds the two girls hostage at a sandwich shop and then kidnaps Lisa.
Like many 13- year- olds, Meredith is riddled with social anxiety: “Often after school she felt as if she’d just spent seven hours and fifteen minutes on stage, with two brief intermissions during which she sat on a stone- cold toilet in a tiny stall cursing herself for all the missed cues and blown lines.”
She resents Lisa and her clique — she’s sharply aware that she and Lisa haven’t exchanged a word all year despite having adjacent lockers.
Her fortunes change after Lisa’s kidnapping. As the last person to see Lisa alive, Meredith gains a level of social cachet.
She starts ditching her best friends to hang out with Lisa’s friends; she buys golden gladiator sandals, the trendy shoes she mocked as “stupid and phony” when she didn’t dare to wear them.
But while her star rises, her inner life goes to pieces.
She spends more and more time in an alternate reality in which she and Lisa are both abducted, locked in a dingy apartment, sitting with their legs intertwined in a cramped bathtub.
Her trauma divides her from her family, which already was struggling for equilibrium after her brother Logan, a promising baseball player, was half- blinded by a foul ball six months earlier. “How were you supposed to help the girl not taken? There was no group for this. No best practices.”
While their father, Mark, is a force of optimistic will, their mother, Claire, finds herself unanchored, unable to reach her children and unable to relate to her husband.
Half of the novel is told from Claire’s point of view, and she’s really the main attraction — a flawed but loving woman, not above using her position as a dentist to punish the occasional schoolyard bully.
Despite the central crime element, Lisa Bellow is more character study than suspense novel. Unfortunately, the prose isn’t quite strong enough to make up for a languid plot.
Still, Perabo makes some interesting observations about character and family life, and her book should have some emotional resonance with anyone who’s felt out of place or left behind.