It takes place over 25 years as they deal with this trauma in their own ways through friendships and love affairs, marriage and divorce, parenthood, holidays, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days. An example of the latter is Carry the One by Carol Anshaw.Ĭarry the One is about three siblings and their friends who experience a devastating moment following a wedding. If not, the novel will become a slog with protagonists that barely anyone will root for. If done right, they can be pretty engaging with characters so fascinating that readers will look past the thin plot. The emphasis is on the character and how they deal with things, and the plot is put on the back burner. Nick, a gifted astronomer crippled by addiction, seeks escape from one in the other.I understand that there are some books that are intended to be character studies. Alice, obsessed with painting and with the fellow bridesmaid she slept with on the night of the accident, becomes an eventual star of the art world – and of some of the book's sexy passages. Saintly Carmen, pregnant and impulsively married, works in a women's shelter, campaigns for social justice and props up her siblings when they fall. The narrative glides through the lives of Alice and Nick, who were in the car, and their older sister Carmen, whose wedding they were celebrating.
The gentle panorama Carol Anshaw builds from everyday vignettes makes Carry the One feel deceptively light. What follows is 25 years chasing penance, with plenty of disappointments and a couple more deaths thrown in.Īnd yet the novel never buckles under its weight. The novel begins in 1983, with five drunk and drugged-up friends accidentally killing a young girl as they drive home from a wedding in Wisconsin. C ombined, the events in Carry the One could make a catalogue of tragedy.
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