15 Years of Summer Reading
What have our big
picks been for the best season in books? On our anniversary year, we look back
at great reads from the past decade and a half.
7 of 15
Don't I Know You?
By Karen Shepard
240 pages;
Harper Perennial
2006
A
shocking loss puts a boy's own survival at risk.
Karen
Shepard's third novel, Don't I Know You?, recalls the
grungy and ominous world of 1970s America. It is a tale told in three parts,
over a span of more than a decade, of the murder of a single woman on the West
Side of Manhattan, and the cost of this event on the lives of her only son and
several of those who were close to her. The son, Steven, is 12 in the first
part of the novel, which opens in the moments after the murder; Shepard's
understanding of the psychological murk of boys that age is startling, and so
is her intensity. She wants you to feel the heat of the era's violence and
confusion in a personal, psychological way. This sounds dark, and it is, but so
well written, so sure-footed and unflinching in its view of everyday reality
and the flawed tools we humans are given to cope with the stone-heavy burdens
of errant sexuality, rage, guilt, and regret that the effect is profoundly
bracing and, like all tragedy, cathartic. Shepard has found a voice here that
is as strong and confident and full of wise observation as any in recent
American fiction.
— Vince Passaro
Published 06/10/2015