The story begins in 1983, at an unpretentious Wisconsin farmhouse wedding. Carmen Kenney, the pregnant bride, waits impatiently for her guests to leave, sobered by the disconcerting realization she doesn’t really know her husband, Matt. She wearily says goodbye to a car filled with passengers: her sister Alice; her new sister-in-law Maude; Tom, an acquaintance; her brother Nick and his girlfriend, Olivia, the driver.

Carmen asks Olivia if she’s all right to drive. Olivia, who has spent the day ingesting various drugs says yes. And maybe she means it. In the backseat, Alice pays more attention to Maude’s advances than to Olivia’s capabilities as a driver. So Alice doesn’t notice what’s happened and sees the child only when their eyes briefly meet as the girl flies over the car’s hood.

She looked to be about nine or ten, although she had the adult features of kids from rougher places. She was quite beautiful, with a mop of hair bleached white by half a summer, green eyes staring at absolutely nothing.

The death of the child, Casey Redman, and what it means to those left behind forms the foundation of Anshaw’s perceptive novel.  The protagonists struggle with personal dilemmas, both of their own making and driven by their environment as they grapple with guilt and residual damage. Anshaw shows the reader occasional glimpses before the accident, but the majority of the novel focuses on its aftermath: this trauma proves to be the defining moment of their lives.

While Alice and Maude’s relationship flickers on and off—testing the sustainability of romance borne of tragedy—Alice seeks to add another element to Casey’s short life. Through art, she creates tangible proof that Casey existed in a series of paintings about the child. Alice’s struggle with the accident feels at times enviable and brave, and at others like a painful loop she cannot escape.

Alice was beginning to see the terms of these paintings. She would wait for them to arrive and then paint them, like the clicking of a shutter, making snapshots out of oil and canvas. This was the central point of her art now, to record the girl’s unlived life.

In this regard, Alice submerges her own life in that liminal moment when Casey’s ended.

Before the accident, Nick had thought he would only casually date Olivia, yet the tragedy forges a defining link. They mark time together, united in a painful shared past. Carmen hides her remorse, but wonders if the child’s death cast a pall over her entire marriage, “played out under a long stretch of shadow it couldn’t outrun.” Even her son, Gabriel, born after Casey’s death, reminds the reader that fate denied the Redmans the pleasure of watching their daughter grow up.

The novel also casts the siblings as children, living in the pall of parental dysfunction. Even in adulthood, Alice, Carmen, and Nick must remain united against their parents—Horace the bully and Loretta the accomplice. Anshaw adroitly explores the relationship between the Kenneys’ familial background and who they become in the wake of trauma. Their ingrained roles, likely formed before they reached Casey’s age, remain a strong force in the novel, even though the moment that defines them—the accident—occurs during adulthood. Among the three siblings, one craves parental affection, one shuns it, and one has created a hell so complete that Mom and Dad don’t factor into the equation.

Anshaw dips into the minds of Alice, Carmen, and Nick as they attempt to make sense of what happened and comprehend their roles. In a novel so concerned with the internal fault lines of guilt and grief, this omniscience feels perfect. The relatively long expanse of time covered by Carry the One gives Anshaw space to fully explore her characters’ lives and their complex adaptations to enduring pain. The story unfolds over twenty-five years, including societal touchstones from the tenth anniversary of John Lennon’s death to the horrors of 9/11. The world carries on, even if the Kenneys remain shackled to the past.

Throughout the book, Alice and Carmen keep a wary watch over Nick, who lapses into the shadowy world of addiction. His penance of choice might be different from theirs, but he pays all the same. The sisters continue to reach out to their brother as he medicates his demons with an unwavering dedication. Scenes where Alice and Carmen try to pull Nick out of himself will resonate for anyone with an addict in the family.

Carol Anshaw’s Carry the One renders lives forever altered in the aftermath of one fateful day. The past declares itself, but the Kenney siblings prove time and again that a single event may be refracted in ways as diverse and unaccountable as the individuals it touches. Against the changing landscape of time and memory, they may falter under the weight of Casey Redman, but carry on they must.

Further Links and Resources

• At Simon & Schuster’s author page, watch a video interview with Carol Anshaw and read an excerpt from Carry the One.
• Follow Anshaw on Twitter: @carolanshaw
• This NPR story about dog books features Anshaw’s Lucky in the Corner. Learn more about her other previous novels, Seven Moves and Aquamarine, on her website.
• The author is also a painter; here are samples of Anshaw’s artwork, together with information about her Vita Sackville-West project.

Cheever emerged from rehab a different man, 20 pounds lighter, feeling 20 years younger. “I am changed violently,” he said, and so too was his work. After years of squeezing toothpaste out of an ever tighter tube, he powered his way through a new novel, finishing it within a year. “It is as if our Chekhov had tucked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing a cape and leotard of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man’,” wrote the New York Times of the resulting book, “Falconer”, a “dark radiant fable” about a man’s escape from prison, whose frank depictions of homosexuality and addiction shocked the Book of the Month crowd expecting Cheever’s usual martini-hour melancholy. It was a work of liberation in every sense.

And on the other end of things:

“AA can only help weak people because their ego is strengthened by the group,” said Fitzgerald. “I was never a joiner.” Certainly, if what you’re used to is rolling champagne bottles down Fifth Avenue beneath the light of a wanton moon or getting into the kind of barfights that make a man feel alive, truly alive, the basic facts of recovered life—the endless meetings, the rote ingestion of the sort of clichés the writer has spent his entire life avoiding—are below prosaic.

This debate reminds me a bit of a book I’m (finally) reading, Peter D. Kramer’s Against Depression, which by turns is both brilliant and infuriating. I absolutely agree with the book’s central premise — that depressed artists often romanticize their illness to the point that they avoid therapy and/or medication because they think they need that darkness to produce great work…when in reality, they’d probably create more and better work (and of the less self-aggrandizing or self-pitying variety) if they sought treatment. For someone who has spent much of his or her life depressed, the memory of that darkness isn’t going anywhere, and the right drugs or therapists won’t annihilate or even hamper a rich imagination.

Yes, yes! I thought, as I — in functioning-melancholic style — rather merrily called up several loved ones who battle (or don’t battle) depression and read them long passages. My boyfriend put a pillow over his head, then said he might read it. Later. After DFW’s suicide, I sheepishly hid the book in my underwear drawer for several months, but while unpacking in Columbus, I picked it up again.

As I continue reading, I’m more skeptical. What’s worrying about Against Depression are the occasional but pronounced moments when the author takes a superior attitude to his patients, the ones who continue to see their illness as an important, if destructive, part of their identity. I understand his frustration, but in such moments Kramer reminds us that he is someone who has never been depressed (or an alcoholic or addict of any kind) or an artist. And this purposeful distance, this occasional lack of empathy, would make it hard for a depressed person to fully trust him that taking anti-depressants won’t take away the deep need to create or the drive behind that — and that finding a new way in will be worth it.

Many artists are, as Fitzgerald noted, skeptical about any group mentality, the adoption of rote answers, or the use of a drug that makes you feel more stable, that makes your emotions less intense — even if the goals are support and health. People who offer up the knee-jerk criticism, “If you were a diabetic, you would take your insulin,” don’t seem to realize that there isn’t as precise a medicine for depression, that dosages remain mysterious, and even a cocktail-and-response the doctor perceives as “working” might not be working for the patient. For alcoholics, it may seem simpler — you just stop drinking — but when so much of your former life (be it social or solitary) revolved around holding a bottle or glass and feeling something you are no longer allowed to, you have to do more life revision than merely erasing that bottle or glass from your hand. Add art to the equation–art that for years saved you from that depression or came in bursts during that drinking–and you might have to wonder, for the first time or even harder, why you need it. Where it comes from. Why it matters. Will Against Depression explore these kinds of questions? I hope so.

The Rooms, a novel that will not be housed in the self-help section of any bookstore, will be released in the United States next year; it recently published in the UK (Hutchinson), where the Independent called Shone “brave” in his decision to “take on” AA culture, but the Sunday Times described the book as a “cutting” yet “rather forgiving book, pulling its punches and turning into a romantic comedy about a man who is a ­schmuck, instead of pressing home its ­dissection of a character who is — as Kelsey tells him — ‘loathsome even by the standards of the industry you represent’.” Reviewer Phil Baker notes that

[t]he AA angle works neatly within the theme of the book, because Miller’s lying flips together so well with the alcoholic tendency to “denial”. Indeed it is the sacrosanct truthfulness of an AA meeting — the sharing of personal testimonies — that makes Hannah [a woman he meets in AA] so disgusted with Miller for attending under false pretences. She can cope with the fact that he is a book-biz pimp trailing Kelsey [the author he wants to sign], but not with his misleading people who are trying to be honest about themselves.

Thanks to Celeste for sending me the Tom Shone article.