Before You Know Kindness (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback)

With a competent, mellifluous, and powerful, often-poetic language, Bohjalian obviously shows an astute, and probably rather cynical understanding of human nature that makes his story one of great universality. The novel focuses on the Seton's, a family of old New England money. They have a family home in New Hampshire and all three generations readily holiday there every summer, playing tennis, badminton, and golf, and enjoying gin and tonics on the wraparound porch.

Although on the surface, the Seton's seem happy and well adjusted, Nan, the current matriarch notices that things are wrong. The problem is that when they are all together "they can never just...be. They just didn't sit well as a family." Catherine, Nan's daughter-in law, is married to her son, the sanctimonious animal rights activist Spencer McCullough, but Catherine is starting to doubt her marriage to him as she surreptitiously and rebelliously eats beef behind his back. And neither Spencer nor Catherine seems to have time for their 12-year-old daughter, Charlotte. Nan's daughter, Sara is married to John, a civil rights lawyer in Vermont. They have a daughter, Willow, who is best friends with her cousin. However, Sara has recently given birth to Patrick, and lately, he seems to be taking up all their attention. They have little time for Willow. Now that he has a son, John feels inclined to take up deer hunting, so that when Patrick is older they can both share something perceivably "masculine."

One night John carelessly leaves a half-loaded rifle in the trunk of his car and Charlotte, stoned and drunk from a night out around a local bonfire, accidentally pulls the trigger hitting Spencer in the shoulder and crippling him for life. Charlotte thought her father was a deer and that it had trespassed onto their vegetable garden. The accident ends up testing the strengths and values that unite the family as Bohjalian skillfully builds a rich and complex drama around this terrible event. Blame is proportioned in turn to the gun manufacturers, and then to John "who is numb but also full of remorse because he'd never bothered to deal with the jammed bullet. The family is left to cope with managing Spencer's debilitating injury and the rift that the accident creates between the stringently vegan Spencer and the pro-gun, meat eating John.

Although much of the plot revolves around Spencer - a key figure in FERAL, the militant animal rights organization that gears up for a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer - each character at various points in the novel moves to center stage in a series of interior and thought-provoking monologues to comment on the events and their repercussions. Bohjalian does a great job of capturing their individual points of view, their insecurities about the accident, and their very different and unique personalities as each of them deal with the tragic event in his or her own unique way. Spencer is given "a kind of a spiritual second chance - he still has a future, but it might not have been the future he once had imagined." Bohjalian is careful to stay objective and he never obviously takes sides, and even though most of the characters are careless and self-serving, the reader will obviously develop sympathies for many of them even though they may not agree with their the various points of view. Mike Leonard October 04.

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