I’m always very taken with stories of trauma. Aren’t we all? Oh, come on, you’ve slowed down to look at a car crash or paused to look at photos of disaster in a paper. It’s human nature, I think — to be a little voyeuristic when it comes to calamities. Other people’s, that is, we’re very private about our own lives, if it comes to that. So, books about tragedies always appeal to me.
The latest in that genre is a book I had actually watched the movie of, a while ago. The Deep End Of The Ocean stars Michelle Pfiefer as a woman whose child is kidnapped and the repercussions that has on the entire family. I didn’t even realise it was a book until I came across it second hand at one of the many small bookstores I frequent, and being a sucker for anything sad and angsty, instantly picked it up. It’s a book I like returning to — I’m not sure why, something about the disintegrating of a family helps me remember my own blessings, or some such. There are times when you want to reach out and slap the main character, mainly for forgetting that she has other children too, in particular her older son, who then acts out by getting into all sorts of trouble.
The Deep End Of The Ocean isn’t a particularly well-written book, I mean, it’s okay, as far as prose goes and at capturing the emotions that run through a family during a time of crisis, but it’s not what you would call “fine literature.” And yet, it’s been picked for Oprah’s Book Club (the first book to be selected in fact) and made into a pretty major motion picture. All this about a book that could have quite well been ignored and shoved into the “bestseller” mode of women in times of sorrow that are everywhere these days.
Personally, I like it because of the highly intense portraits it draws. The book’s main characters are Beth, the mother and Vincent, her older son, the boy who was meant to be watching his brother before he got kidnapped. Both their feelings of guilt eventually destroy them from the inside, even though the book has a reasonably happy ending, you’re not quite sure where it leaves the family. Do Beth and her husband split up? Does Vincent resolve his anger issues? Is anything ever going to be the same again? I suspect the reason it was given an ambiguous ending is because life, in itself, is ambiguous. Are any of us ever really going to be okay? There are no easy answers — but, hey, that’s the way it goes.
The columnist is an author