ProduktrezensionenA Crime in the Neighborhood Paperback Suzanne Berne

Well-crafted, well observed,

In the long hot summer of 1972, three events shattered the serenity of ten year old Marsha’s life: her father ran away with her mother’s sister Ada; Boyd Ellison, a young boy, was molested and murdered in a woodland area behind a shopping mall; and Watergate made the headlines.
Marsha Mayhew lived with her mother and two siblings in the Spring Hill neighborhood near an East Coast city. With its box shaped lawns, square trimmed trees and doors left unlocked at night, the Spring Hill neighborhood was ordinary. The closest the term ‘crime’ in Spring Hill and its adjacent mall could be used in association with any wrong-doing was shoplifting or a dog being run over and the driver not stopping.
Boyd Ellison and his parents lived in that neighborhood. Young twelve year old Boyd’s death would palpably alter Spring Hill. Subtle forms of vigilantism permeated the neighborhood with local men patrolling the streets at night in pairs and even Marsha in her own small, naive way becomes part of that vigilantism by recording everything that happens in her notebook. Those recordings will not only impact on her and her mother but on the neighborhood as a whole and especially on Marsha’s neighbour, Mr Green.
Suzanne Berne’s debut novel, her most recent The Dogs of Littlefield being long-listed for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a well-crafted, well observed slice of not only suburbia but America in the early years of the 1970s. The author captures a societal collapse instigated not only by the death of local boy but by the ongoing realization that the Watergate scandal will change the United States forever.
The author captures a more delicate societal collapse within a family through the eyes of a ten year old in a way that mirrors, to some extent, Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird. Suzanne Berne has instilled Marsha with a voice as resonant and ironic as touching as that of Scout Finch. The author bravely portrays Boyd Ellison as a bully and a boy who would continually ask children to borrow their things or would simply take it. Marsha wonders if all this asking meant that he had ‘asked’ to be killed.

“this...is how life can change: you can ask for what happens to you, without realizing what you’re asking for. Perhaps, this is supposed to be fate...Fate might be no more than a mischance...the decision to take a shortcut...through the woods behind a shopping mall.”

Despite dealing with the sombre and sensitive issues of the death of a young boy and the break-up of a marriage the novel is capable of emitting tenderness and humour. The author has managed to combine all these ingredients without allowing one to overpower the other and so spoil the recipe. Added to this recipe is the subtle undertow of satire that permeates the novel. The Watergate scandal will profoundly affect the American people and bring them out of their political complacency. But, like the men who patrolled the neighborhood of Spring Hill after Boyd Ellison’s death people will eventually come to the conclusion that these events are not the norm, America is still a great country and these events are anomalies. Marsha’s mother will become one of statistics in the increasing divorce rate of the 1970s which will result in driving her and other women to increase their education and work experience.
This winner of the 1999 Orange Prize for Fiction is written in a simple, lucid ineluctable style. The novel evocatively recreates the sights and sounds of the Spring Hill suburb to such an extent that one can almost smell the manicured lawns and feel the heat of the summer sun as it shines down incongruously on a neighborhood where a dark shadow now looms on the streets and in the homes of the residents.
Suzanne Berne’s novel shows how a neighborhood can be affected and changed not only due to local events but larger national events within or without the country one lives in. These events are mistakes. Mistakes not only created by oneself but by others can impact on your life. Mistakes can leave us feeling vulnerable due to us not always knowing how much they will affect us.

“Because the truth is, mistakes are where life really happens. Mistakes are when we get tricked into realizing something we never meant to realize, which is why stories about mistakes. Mistakes are the moments when we don’t know what will happen to us next. An appalling, exhilarating thought. And while we entertain it, the secret dreaming life comes groping out.”Vollständige Rezension lesen...

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