truepenny | UBC: Barthel, A Death in Canaan

A Death In Canaan by Joan Barthel

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Unfortunately, this book just wasn't very good.

I've been trying to figure out why; it's not just that Barthel doesn't have any sense of how true crime works as a genre--she's not really writing true crime. The problem maybe is that she doesn't know what she's writing, so that what comes across is "This thing happened and I was there and me and my really important friends Did Something About It." It's not a memoir, because it's not about her, even though she keeps putting bits of her personal life in it for no clear reason. It's not really about Peter Reilly, who remains a cipher at the center of the book (and there are some questions about him that Barthel doesn't even seem aware she might want to try to answer); you might say it's about Barbara Gibbons, the murdered woman, but she is perforce an absence, only reconstructed from the people who knew her. And it can't be about the solving of Barbara Gibbons' murder, because that murder remains unsolved to this day.

It takes a writer who is not an artist but an obsessive and intensely self-aware artisan to write a book about an unsolved murder and make it work. Barthel complains about all the unknowns and ambiguities in the case, but she makes no effort (at least, no effort that she discusses) to find the answers. She comes across as a dilettante, a sightseer at someone else's tragedy. I have no idea if this is a fair assessment or not, which is what I mean by needing a self-aware artisan at the helm of a book like this. Barthel doesn't show any awareness of the self she's presenting through her narrative, and fortunately or unfortunately, the narrator in true crime--or, more generally, in nonfiction books about ambiguous or uncertain events (cf the book I just reviewed, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster)--is vitally important. The reader has to trust the author, not necessarily to know the truth, but to be able to distinguish between that they do know and they don't know, and part of that, if the narrator is also a character in the book's events, is self-awareness. Which Barthel just doesn't demonstrate.

There's also no throughline--as I said, she doesn't really seem to know what story she's telling or why she's telling it. The thing is hopelessly open-ended, which in itself isn't necessarily a problem, but Barthel neither has a story to put within that open-endedness, nor the skill needed to make the open-endedness her story.

At this remove, I have no idea why this book was nominated for a Pulitzer--except that Barthel's original article did uncover a really spectacular miscarriage of justice.

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