Before You Know Kindness

Summary (from the publisher): For ten summers, the Seton family—all three generations—met at their country home in New England to spend a week together playing tennis, badminton, and golf, and savoring gin and tonics on the wraparound porch to celebrate the end of the season. In the eleventh summer, everything changed. A hunting rifle with a single cartridge left in the chamber wound up in exactly the wrong hands at exactly the wrong time, and led to a nightmarish accident that put to the test the values that unite the family—and the convictions that just may pull it apart.

Before You Know Kindness is a family saga that is timely in its examination of some of the most important issues of our era, and timeless in its exploration of the strange and unexpected places where we find love.

As he did with his earlier masterpiece, Midwives, Chris Bohjalian has written a novel that is rich with unforgettable characters—and absolutely riveting in its page-turning intensity.

Review: This novel is about the Seton family: grandmother Nan, children John and Catherine, in-laws Sara and Spencer, grandchildren Willow, Charlotte, and baby Patrick. Every summer, they spend a week at the Seton country home in New England. However, this summer is different when tragedy strikes. Young Charlotte finds her uncle's hunting rifle and accidentally shoots her father Spencer (who happens to be a animals rights' advocate and staunch vegan) in the shoulder, permanently maiming him and nearly killing him. This story is of the family's struggle to make sense of this event, struggle to move past it and other issues that have been eating at the family, and ultimately move forward.

This is the third novel I've read by Chris Bohjalian, having read Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls previously. Bohjalian seems to like to create a scene and then drop a bomb in the middle of his characters and see how they all respond to the crisis. In Before You Know Kindness, that cataclysmic event is the accidental shooting of Spencer McCullough by his young daughter Charlotte. Yet the fatal flaw is that the author gives away this event in the prologue. As many other readers have suggested, the action of the novel occurs in the opening pages, leaving little momentum to get through the rest of the book. In many ways, this novel is more a character study of all the members of the Seton-McCullough family.

There are many lines early in the novel that would prove foreshadowing to the shooting, except for the fact that the reader already knows the shooting will take place, rendering the foreshadowing less than subtle. This includes Charlotte's grumbling "If I had a gun, I would have shot it" in the first chapter (10) and John's fetching of his gun to place in his trunk so he can take it to the gunsmith only pages later.

Unfortunately, despite being the victim, Spencer isn't exactly the most loveable guy. He works for FERAL (an obvious stand-in for PETA) and even muses to himself on how bad his attitude is; "Sometimes Spencer feared he was growing into a middle-aged bully - a verbose version of his occasionally sullen father" (54). He's the type of guy that angrily insists that his family can't get a dog because they live in an apartment and then even after changing his mind, won't tell them to get a dog because he's just too stubborn to admit defeat or flaws in thinking. His wife is thinking of leaving him and tells him that "Sometimes it's just easier to go along with your...your beliefs...than to listen to your lectures" (288).

In many ways, although the shooting appears to be the tragedy of the novel, in others it's the wake up call. Spencer becomes a better father and husband. As a young man, Spencer began to feel guilty for routinely killing dozens of lobsters every night at his summer job at a seafood restaurant. This guilt transpired into an extreme vegan lifestyle, his career, his bullying of his family. I'd like to think that he would like better for his daughter, not allowing the shooting accident to become the grounding of her life. Although it takes Spencer a long time and much cajoling to let the accident be just that - an accident, I think it is resolved in the end.

Simply put, this novel was not Bohjalian's best. I liked Willow, but basically all the McCulloughs (Spencer, Charlotte, and Catherine) weren't terribly likeable. Nan seemed like a stock grandmother figure, neatly killed off in the novel's end. Even her golden retriever never gets a name in the book. However, I think the ultimate flaw of this book was giving away the main event in the prologue. The build of the novel was burst from the opening pages, leaving merely long rambling third person character musings for the rest of the book.

Stars: 3