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Dramatis personae: Natalie, Sara, and Bobby Askedahl; their father, a very successful politician and educational reformer; their mother; Natalie's husband Eric, a corporate lawyer; their two children, Lilly, and Julia, a prodigy. Setting: Berkeley, California, the golden state. Natalie's father spent his life successfully arguing for free higher education for every Californian; her mother spent her life grooming her prodigal son, Bobby, for a brilliant life as a mathematician. For Bobby, however, something goes wrong, and he comes home from college terribly changed.
Against this backdrop of family memories turned tragic, Natalie, the mother of two daughters and a teacher of young children, must live in the same city where a bomber is on the loose. Random home-made bombs are sent to educators in the Bay Area. As each target opens a package bomb, it maims and kills. Natalie's daughter is visiting Berkeley with her high school class when a bomb goes off. She is safe from the Calbomber - this time - but what about the next time? Natalie's intelligent daughter, Julia, is in her teenage years and growing in awareness of the dangers of the world. As the "golden state" of childhood wears off, Natalie and Eric learn to give their children the gift of knowledge of the world, that other kind of education.
Kegan seems to have modeled the villain of the work, the Calbomber, on the Unabomber of the 1990s. An FBI search leads to a remote cabin in the woods where the Calbomber, like the Unabomber, has tried and failed to lead a survivalist lifestyle. The book's exposition pivots between Natalie's flashbacks to her own childhood and what her pro-education parents told or withheld from her; the FBI pursuit of the Calbomber, whose hatred of higher educational institutions is published in his manifesto; and Natalie and Eric's marriage and childrearing as they come to terms with the world-as-it-is, knowledge, the spread of knowledge via education and via the mass media.
This work is delicately crafted and works gently, via accumulation of small, apparently homely scenes and ideas: a child's made-up words, a skirt worn by a woman, a copy of a magazine. Although the Calbomber's depredations cause mayhem and murder, Kegan's fiction is ultimately not about mayhem and murder, but about whether innocence is a "golden state." What kinds of knowledge should we hold and bear, and at what expense? As knowledge-bearers, what truths do we bequeath to those to whom we are responsible?
§ Dr. Cathy Downs is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, January 2015
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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