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Title: A Crime in the Neighborhood : A Novel by Suzanne Berne ISBN: 0-8050-5580-0 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 15 July, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (40 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Crime in the voice of a child...
Comment: A Crime in the Neighborhood, as Seen Through the Eyes of a Child
"Even during the worst times of your life, there are moments when life seems normal, and then you catch yourself wondering which kinds of moments-the terrible or the normal-are the real ones." (p. 147)
When I find myself in a terrible situation and feel threatened and overcome by fear, the line between reality and illusion fades away, and what used to be black and white, muddles together into gray uncertainty. As the above statement from Suzanne Berne's novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, says, in times of trauma, the normal moments scattered throughout a sea of fearful ones may not even seem real. This work, her first published novel, depicts the summer of 1972 in a Washington D.C. suburb and centers around the notion of uncertainty. As the story progresses, Berne urges readers to ponder fear, reality, suspicion, and the unknown. The neighborhood is shaken when a young boy is murdered. As both the federal government and society begin to change, the neighborhood evolves as well. Told through the eyes of ten-year-old Marsha, readers gain a child's view of the murder and are able to reach inside her mind and understand her suspicions and curiosities. Readers also are exposed to the young girl's memories of when her family struggled with the initial shock of a divorce and strove to put the pieces back together and start a new life.
In her note to readers, Suzanne Berne reveals the source of her inspiration for this novel. On a June afternoon, she sat on her porch with pen and paper merely to appear productive. Critics of her past novel attempt told her she wrote well but needed to include more action, so she scribbled down the first chapter of A Crime in the Neighborhood, which depicts the twisted and brutal murder of twelve-year-old Boyd Ellison. She glanced up from her page, only to see her neighbor across the street, mowing his lawn. In this moment she found the inspiration for the character of Mr. Green, the kind-hearted yet friendless next-door neighbor whom Marsha tediously observes and suspects. Berne states, "My neighbor is actually a very nice guy and no one would confuse him with a murderer; yet I began to realize that to an impressionable person with too much time on her hands, anyone can start to seem sinister after a while." Thus, Berne found her premise and spring boarded from there.
What gives this novel its especial flare is the fact that a child narrates it. Harper Lee excelled in using this tactic in her classic novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, emphasizing the importance of viewing a calamitous situation from an innocent, observant perspective, in order to more fully understand its repercussions. Marsha, our ten-year-old narrator, achieves this goal by showing us her world and explaining exactly what she thinks and feels. When she hears the phrase, "a child has gotten lost," the fact that she is a young child becomes apparent in her commentary: "A child has gotten lost. The grammatical construction of this statement baffled me. Who had lost the child? Had he lost himself? Could you lose a child the same way you could lose the car keys? Even then I was something of a determinist. As most children are; I believed that things were lost for a reason" (107). Suzanne Berne includes indications such as these throughout the novel that remind us of our narrator's age as well as her naivety and innocence. Rather than building a barrier between us, like age gaps often do, I found Marsha's nescience of the world endearing, creating a more personal connection between us. This shared alliance between us helped me to enter her world and more aptly understand what life was like for her. I suppose this is Suzanne Berne's intent: to draw you into Marsha's world so you can experience first hand all that she endures.
Suzanne Berne's main strength lies in the beauty and precision of her descriptive prose. I found myself getting lost in her words as she almost cinematically depicts everything from the neighborhood yards to the facial expressions of the characters. She writes, "Outside, the sky had turned the color of an old pie tin. The wind pushed up the bare braches of the horse chestnuts across the street and drove sticks and candy wrappers across the sidewalk" (44). Berne purposefully uses metaphor and vivid language to contrast the fact that our narrator is a child. We know that we are listening to a child tell the story, but through passages like these, we remember that we are reading a meticulously created work of a mindful adult. By knowing this, we, as readers, continue to attach literary value to this novel along the way.
The choice to present this story through the eyes of a child was brilliant and effective, but the only qualm I have about this novel relates to this central choice. Marsha is the narrator, and for the bulk of the book she narrates in the past, showing us her world when she was ten. Thus, the voice is actually Marsha as an adult, looking back at her childhood, aiming to resurrect her thoughts and feelings as she remembers them. At times throughout the book, it is unclear which Marsha is speaking: Marsha the adult or Marsha the child. Suzanne Berne excels in so many facets of novel writing, I only wish she had a better grasp on how to convey her particular chronology with readers.
Provoking timeless questions of reality, suspicion, fate, and fear, A Crime in the Neighborhood encourages readers to approach the story with child-like inquisitiveness and fervor.
Source for the author's note: http://www.henryholt.com/readingguides/berne.htm
Rating: 4
Summary: Scout Finch attends Sex Ed. 101
Comment: In A Crime in the Neighborhood, Suzanne Berne creates a realistic world as seen through the eyes of a ten year old child, Marsha. With a voice similar to Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Suzanne successfully draws and maintains the reader's attention throughout the novel. With expertise the author intertwines sexuality and period social norms to create complete characters that, more often than not, may resemble someone in our own neighborhood.
Marsha, a daddy's girl, has always awoken to her dad drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper. This picture-perfect world soon crumbles when her father runs off with her mother's sister Ada. Marsha blames all that ensues on the departure of her father. Soon after her mom becomes a neat-freak, her older twin siblings steal cigarettes, a bully in her neighborhood is raped and killed, and a creepy neighbor moves in next door. In the final pages, after Sherlock Holmes-esque detective work, Marsha claims to know the murderer and reveals all. Sadly no relationships mend as expected, but hey, real life takes many paths.
Berne writes her book to educate the reader. With themes of sex and 70's gender roles, she covers a wide array of interests that makes her book marketable and enjoyed to the masses. The characters Berne depicts are comfortable with themselves sexually which makes for some humorous passages for the reader. The ever-curious Marsha spies on her aunts undressing at one point: "Aunt Claire smiled as she pulled off her blouse. She wasn't wearing a brassiere at all. Instead of the two cones I'd been expecting, a pair of small, flattened-looking eyes confronted me, oatmeal-colored save for the brown, protruding, button iris(26)". This is where Marsha differs from Scout Finch. Scout was curious with what went on in the world around her, whereas Marsha focused on what happened behind closed doors. The most sexually embracing character, hands down, is Luann. She entertains herself with hermaphrodite, or "confused", Barbies who have sex. Some readers may find this type of material offensive, but personally I laughed. Passages like these balance the ominous parts of this novel that deal with the killing of an undeserving child. I cannot understand the presence of Luann, or the underlying tones of sex in A Crime in the Neighborhood, other than that these ideas might reflect the changing times of American culture, and highlight the sexual affair within the novel.
Gender roles of the 70's are blatantly explicit in this novel, educating the reader of societal changes over the past three decades. At a time when single-parent families were uncommon, the neighbors felt uncomfortable around Marsha's family and even with their single neighbor Mr. Green. The men-folk of the street had no shame in knocking on Mr. Green's door and informing him that this was a "family neighborhood" (251). It surprised me that singleness was looked down upon, even when in all other aspects Mr. Green was a near perfect neighbor. Also typical of 70's life was the sole provider. The men brought home the dough so to speak, while the women raised the kids. Some people argue that our society has changed for the worse, but I beg to differ. Growing up in a family where both parents work, or at times just my mom, I can appreciate these social revolutions.
I could not get enough of Suzanne Berne's writing techniques. She utilized metaphors like crazy, played with the reader's emotions, and kept a strong voice throughout, all qualities characteristic of great writers. People's yards became "lit-up pools of lawn" (69), and Mr. Green's car was a "boatlike Dodge anchored in the driveway" (67). Phrases like these flooded my mind with images, drawing me deeper into the realistic landscape of Berne's D.C. street. Unfortunately these metaphorical expressions halted midway through the novel, but were replaced by color repetition instead. Everything in the second half of the novel related to the color orange. There were orange balloons, orange sodas, orange muumuus, orange coals, orange Kool-Aid...orange, orange, orange. Maybe my brain is just twisted, but I think the color orange has some hidden meaning; whatever it is, Berne keeps it hidden from the reader.
Suzanne Berne left questions unanswered that seemed important to the plot, leaving me, and I'm sure countless others, with an unnerving sense of incompletion. I was left wondering if the twins ever talked to Marsha, what happened to the other sisters, did Lois remarry, etc. In my opinion this was the novel's major flaw.
What Berne lacked in completion, she made up for in voice. To have the narration be in the voice of a child was proven successful in To Kill a Mockingbird; it worked here magnificently. Children have a way of seeing the world in a completely different way. Evident on page 107 is Marsha's naivety. "[Boyd Ellison] has gotten lost...Who had lost the child...Could you lose a child the same way you could lose the car keys?" Understandably, at age 10, Marsha doesn't quite grasp the concept of death, and Berne captures her innocence, which is amusing, ignoring the circumstances of course. Unlike the format of To Kill a Mockingbird, Berne chooses to intersperse the adult voice of Marsha more frequently, which causes confusion at first until the reader is able to distinguish the two voices. Once discernible, the additional perspective adds another informative and intriguing layer to the story.
In her story of the changing times for one neighborhood, contemporary author Suzanne Berne creates believable characters that one might expect a nosy phone call from. A Crime in the Neighborhood blends time-proven writing styles with modern situations to take the reader on a journey through a decade unknown to many youth while maintaining a humorous, informative, and easy to read format. I doubt this book will become a classic, but it definitely mocks one. Here again the voice of a child captures an audience of adults.
Rating: 3
Summary: Survival and Growth: A Crime in the Neighborhood
Comment: "Always pay for your own movie on a date," they told one another sternly. "Never say thank you unless you mean it. Get respect." ... They knew how fragile men could be... Wear an undershirt and a bra... Be prepared (11).
The strong-willed "they" in the above quote from Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighborhood stands for the family of Lois Eberhardt. As the story goes, at the end of World War II, six women -- Lois and her three sisters, their mother, and their grandmother -- find themselves paying off the debts of the deceased men in the family and fending for themselves. They become wary of men, yet they all marry. The sisters do remember, however, how to live independent of manly influence.
Lois's husband, Larry, cheats on her. In concert, two of her sisters arrive to defend her from the man's weakness. Together, these women survive Larry's infidelity in a way that Lois would have been incapable of performing alone. Yet, after her sisters leave, Lois faces summer alone, with only her young daughter and older twins.
The summer of 1972 stretches these characters' ability to survive. After Larry cheats on Lois, he runs away with one of her sisters, Ada, threatening to split the intense bond between the sisters. This event occurs against the backdrop of a neighborhood calamity -- a local boy raped and murdered behind the town mall. Richard Nixon's watergate scandal finishes the picture with corruption in this Washington D.C. suburb.
The reader is left to draw connections between the summer's events and conclusions from their commonalities. Whereas, according to Lois, Watergate happens as a result of a bumbling mistake, the cause of Boyd Arthur Ellison's murder could not be described this way. Perhaps Larry's adultery fits neatly between these two. The atrocity of his actions means they can neither be condoned, nor simply pitied for their stupidity.
Lois's 10-year-old daughter, Marsha, however, is easily pitiable, although she never asks for it. Through her eyes, the story becomes more grounded in the events of that summer than colored by previous experience, as the narrative of an older person might be. Marsha also has both the advantage and misfortune of being very close to the center of the novel's action.
This novel is Marsha's suvival account of the family's -- especially of Lois's -- strength; it is also a story of her own growth. While Lois concerns herself with making ends meet for her family, Marsha familiarizes herself with the neighborhood. Prompted by a broken ankle, which slows her down, and an odd new neighbor, Mr. Green, Marsha begins taking notes in an evidence log. The facts within this log might take her towards the fame, or the infamy, that she craves as a youngest child with few friends.
This is a novel for anyone who dreamed of fame as a child. It is a novel for those who, as children, wanted to be the only ones knowledgeable of important information. This is a story for single mothers and single men. This book is also for those interested in memoirs, since the narrator is an older person recounting her fictional childhood.
Marsha's story rarely wanders away from youthful thoughts, although sometimes her voicing of those thoughts is distinctly adult. Susanne Berne uses her adult perspective on a child's experiences to question the validity of storytelling. Marsha listens to her mother tell fabulous stories of her youth and her sisters and retells them in internal monologues that seem more true to life. Then again, Marsha herself sometimes daydreams, melding the dream seamlessly with reality until real happenings force her to backtrack and faithfully retell the story.
Sometimes I wished Marsha would not continue with the actual story. She does not have happy thoughts about that summer. Instead, she paints a bleak picture of a too-closely-knit community in the throes of fear. It is not pretty. This neighborhood is the perfect place to learn life lessons but not a place, at least for Marsha, to play carelessly like the child she is. Accordingly, her narrative is not a light read. Whether Berne's lessons do or do not make up for her heavy mood I will leave to the personal aesthetics of the reader.
A Crime in the Neighborhood is well written and well thought-out. I recommend it to anyone for whom this narration style and dark mood calls.
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