Sunday, January 15, 2017

Third Page: A Crime in the Neighborhood

In 1972 Spring Hill was as safe a neighborhood as you could find near an East Coast city, one of those instant subdivisions where brick split-levels and two-car garages had been planted like cabbages on squares of quiet green lawn. Occasionally somebody's Schwinn bicycle was stolen, or a dog was hit by a car that kept on going. Once in a while we heard about a shoplifter at the Spring Hill Mall, six blocks away. But otherwise both the mall and the neighborhood always struck everyone as the most ordinary of places.

Then one summer evening around five-thirty, just as business at the mall had finished for the day, a florist named Miss Evelyn Crespo carried a box of orchid corsages out to her car for a wedding that night. She had parked far back behind the mall in a row of spaces reserved for employees, below a two-acre wooded rise. That time of day, the mall's triangular shadow cut upward across the hill like a wedge. As Miss Crespe slid...


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Winning the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999, Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighborhood, is the narrator's look back on 1972 as she tries to lay to rest the summer when she was nine, her family was going to pieces, and the neighborhood was reeling from the murder of a local 12-year-old boy.

What could have been a fairly ordinary mystery-tinted piece of fiction is elevated, for me, by the unique perspective that the narrator provides. As a reader, I was continually struck by the dual perspective of, on one hand, the narrator as a child looking at and making sense of the world around her and, on the other, the adult narrator's understanding of that juvenile filter through which she once saw.

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