A mass-shooting horror through a first-grader’s lens
Yes, at times it’s hard to read. When you pick up Rhiannon Navin’s debut novel, Only Child (Knopf, 288 pp.,
which tells the story of a Sandy Hook-like mass school shooting from the point of view of a 6-year-old boy who loses his brother, you’ll probably wince in painful recognition.
After all, the madness of gun violence in America is still front and center in 2018. Many readers might hesitate before committing to a novel that asks you to deeply imagine one family’s terror and heartbreak during and after such an event.
But Only Child earns its worth by avoiding gratuitous scenes of horror in favor of a careful examination of the way one boy and his parents, and their community, struggle to survive — and stay together — after the worst has happened.
“When we practiced lockdown drill before, it was fun,” Zach thinks. But when Zach’s first-grade teacher crowds his class into a closet, it’s crammed and hot and confusing. There are pops from the hallway and voices screaming.
One of Navin’s strongest techniques is to evoke Zach’s experience with vivid sensory details — Miss Russell’s acrid coffee breath, the warmth of pee in his pant legs, the way his parents’ bodies shake later while they hug him.
Soon the town — a New York-area suburb standing in for Newtown, Conn. — learns that 19 children have been killed, including Zach’s older brother, Andy, by the troubled son of the school’s beloved longtime security guard.
Zach is plunged into his family’s sorrow and is caught between the different ways his parents react to the loss. While his father, a lawyer at a big firm, offers comfort and connection, Zach’s mother can’t escape her anger and begins to pull away from the family in an effort to rally other survivors against the shooter’s parents.
Over the next few months, Zach suffers nightmares and a fear of returning to school, and he worries about his parents’ arguments. It doesn’t help that Andy’s behavior problems, which were hard on the whole family, complicate their grief.
Delivering the whole of this fraught situation through the perceptions of a child is difficult, and at times the necessary simplifying of Zach’s understanding doesn’t serve the story.
Navin also can veer into unwieldy — and unpersuasive —exposition that feels shoehorned into Zach’s awareness in order to convey information. Why would his mother bother making beds every morning? he wonders, “but Mommy says that’s the old type A account director in her.” Zach’s love for reading the Magic SchoolBus series provides a lovely opportunity to be inside a child’s mind as he works through challenging emotions.
Only Child doesn’t try to reckon with the political or racial aspects of mass shootings, and its sole focus on a wealthy family is a drawback. But tapping into one child’s well-rendered inner experience of such an event is valuable, and all too sadly important for our world today.