{"id":5711,"date":"2016-06-22T15:28:55","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T15:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5711"},"modified":"2016-06-22T16:51:16","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T16:51:16","slug":"the-long-and-faraway-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5711","title":{"rendered":"The Long and Faraway Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lou Berney,\u00a0The Long and Faraway Gone<\/em>\u00a0(William Morrow, March 2015)<\/p>\n

Review by Lee Horsley<\/a><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Lou Berney\u2019s\u00a0The Long and Faraway Gone<\/em>\u00a0is a superb take on the American tradition of tough, witty investigative fiction. Two separate narratives intertwine, only briefly intersecting but sharing the powerfully realized themes of loss, memory, the search for answers and the guilt of the survivor. The point of intersection \u2013 Oklahoma City \u2013 is vividly evoked, both its changing landscape and its communal sense of a past trauma shared and remembered, \u201ca small town at heart\u201d where, after the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building, \u201ceveryone knew someone who had been killed or maimed in the blast or someone who\u2019d descended into hell to help with the rescue.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stories of\u00a0The Long and Faraway Gone<\/em>\u00a0are told from the perspectives of two very different investigators, Wyatt and Julianna, each of whom is struggling with traumatic memories that have haunted them for more than two decades. Wyatt Rivers, who more than holds his own in a long line of wise-cracking private eyes, \u201chad yet to figure it out, the central mystery of his life, why so many people assumed, automatically, that he was being a smart-ass. People he\u2019d never met before, who didn\u2019t know him from Adam.\u201d He is hired to investigate a case that takes him \u2013 very unwillingly \u2013 back to his home town of Oklahoma City, where he cannot avoid reliving and ultimately investigating the far more disturbing central mystery of his own life. In 1986, when he was a teenager, he was the only one to survive a violent robbery at the movie theater where he worked. Again and again, he feels compelled to relive the night of the massacre and to ask himself, \u201cWhy am I still here and all the others gone?\u201d<\/p>\n

Berney\u2019s other central character, Julianna Rosales, was only twelve years old when her life was transformed by an equally random experience of incomprehensible loss. Having taken Julianna to the Oklahoma State Fair, her older sister, Genevieve, asks her to wait for her briefly. As it grows darker and darker, Julianne continues to wait, but her sister never returns: \u201cWhy did Genevieve do it? How could she do it? How could she leave Julianna alone on the curb outside the rodeo arena, dusk falling fast, and never come back? Julianna would never know.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Like Wyatt, Julianna is tormented by the thought of not knowing, and obsessively pursues any leads she can find.<\/p>\n

The Long and Faraway Gone<\/em>\u00a0is a riveting novel \u2013 sharply written, subtle, funny and moving. There are answers to the questions raised, but not altogether tidy and reassuring ones. There is no easy, revealing convergence of the two plot lines. Wyatt and Julianna, who meet twice during the course of their investigations, converse briefly, but only to share fragmentary memories of Oklahoma City in the mid-80s. These are not memories of the mysteries they are trying to unravel but simply recollections of intensely felt moments, like the time they both saw the same tornado \u2013 in Julianna\u2019s memory, \u201cso close it was almost on top of us. It was right there. It had been there all along, and we didn\u2019t know it.\u201d The powerfully experienced memory animated in this scene resembles, for both of them, their ultimate realizations about what happened in the long-ago tragedies of their lives \u2013 something that was there all along, but not recognized until seen in the mind\u2019s eye with a sudden clarity. \u00a0The effect of such moments of recall is to realign facts as they had imagined them to be, allowing them to come to terms with the past and with the possibility of moving on, however tentatively and painfully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lou Berney,\u00a0The Long and Faraway Gone\u00a0(William Morrow, March 2015) Review by Lee Horsley Lou Berney\u2019s\u00a0The Long and Faraway Gone\u00a0is a<\/p>\n

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