Douglas Kennedy – The Great Wide Open: Review

Kennedy's latest – The Great Wide Open- in the truest sense is an American Saga, traversing the seventies and eighties, through the eyes of Alice Burns, the youngest of this New York family, where all its members have distinct and widely different personalities, and whose family dynamic is iconic for the times, yet wholly unique in their on-going relationships throughout these two chaotic decades. The essential theme of the novel is the notion of secrets between family members, secrets with friends and secrets between people in general. Can you trust a family member with a secret? Can you trust anyone with your deepest secrets? And once revealing a close secret to another, is it really a secret anymore?

The narrator starts the story in the year 1972, a year before she graduates high school. Alice is a bookish girl, always text in hand, with an artistic bent, listening to Joni Mitchell and modern Jazz. Like most intelligent individuals, she is a loner. In high school, she really has only two friends. Both Jewish: Carly and Arnold, both cerebral types and cast as outsiders in the school. Typically, we have the stereotyped “in” crowd, a group of jocks and “mean girls” causing havoc. Alice and Arnold are first time lovers, while Carly is a closeted lesbian. Although Carly's sexual preference has never been declared to all and sunder, the school population have a pretty good idea. This, of course, leads to the three outsiders to be bullied constantly, and Carly in particular, leading to a major incident, where Carly disappears, seemingly off the face of the earth. A major investigation ensues, the focus evolving into the discovery of a rampant antisemitism in the school. Guilt also, is a recurrent theme, throughout the story. In the case of Carly's disappearance, Alice withholds the fact that Carly has an adult lover in the city, as she promised her she would never tell anyone. Again resultant guilt. Carly is never found, alive or dead, but there is a twist.

The four key characters in the tale are Alice's two brothers, and her mother and father. Peter is the oldest of the three children, a clever man, attending the Divinity school at Yale Peter is a true left wing political activist. Adam is the middle child, circumspect and without ambition, though we are told this is due to a near fatal car accident, killing his drunken friend, and a hippy family of three in a VW van. The van was totalled, while Adam was the only survivor. Father Burn is a WWII vet, and politically Right Wing. And Alice's mother is portrayed as a somewhat neurotic jew, unhappy with her marriage, and blaming her youngest, Alice, for all her misery. The interactions between these five family members over the two decades, ends rather sadly, but it's what transpires over those twenty years that is fascinating.

We follow Alice into university, and her sudden transfer to Dublin. Her time in Ireland is quite funny from an American perspective. It is those slight differences in language and behaviour, that we see in different countries, and her struggles to learn the Dublin culture, that is hilarious. It is in Dublin that she actually meets the love of her life...a charming and philosophical young man from Northern Ireland. But I'll leave that one there...

Another recurring theme in the book, is what it means to be happy. This may sound banal to many, but Alice's journey is not an easy ride. Because she is an intelligent woman, she is always self-reflecting: What if I had made that decision, would it have saved his life? What if I had told the authorities her big secret, would it have made the circumstances any better? To truly be in love, and lose that love, can one love again? Alice's questions regarding her mother, father and brothers, over the twenty years, when taken in the time and context of the novel, can be seen as universal, albeit in a expanded version, as it is a novel.

The text hums along at your standard Douglas Kennedy pace. It is written so well, one has to force oneself to stop reading, merely to get a few hours of sleep. I have read 12 Kennedy novels over the last 20 years, and The Great Wide Open, stands as one of his best.