Published by Anchor Books / Doubleday, 1994, 390 pages.

“I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn’t learned that it can happen so gradually you don’t lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don’t necessarily sense the motion. I’ve found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.”

Alice Goodwin is a nurse at the local school in a town in the American Midwest. She lives on a farm with her husband Howard and their two young daughters, Emma and Claire, five and three.

The book begins on a summer day, which seems to start off well enough—Alice has a foreboding of something about to happen, but her husband and children are fine. Even though Emma, the older child, seems to be constantly angry with her.

Then her neighbour and close friend Theresa drops off her daughters, each a year younger than Alice’s girls. The girls plan to go swimming in the pond on the Goodwins’ farm. Alice goes up to the bathroom to change, and when she comes down, Theresa’s younger girl, Lizzy, is gone. Believing she was old enough to go swimming on her own, Lizzy had gone to the pond and drowned there.

It is a nightmare scenario—when a child you are entrusted with dies on your watch. Alice blames herself, although Theresa doesn’t. She falls into a deep depression and is barely able to function.

To make things worse, Norman—a troubled child who is clearly neglected by his mother—accuses Alice of sexual harassment at the school. The truth is that Alice found him exasperating and difficult to handle, and one day, she snapped and slapped him. He, realizing that this could help him get some attention from his mother, plays it up. After Lizzy, Alice is ostracized by the town, and the gossip about her behaviour in school is adding fuel to the fire.

Alice is arrested and put in jail, leaving Howard to manage the farm and the two girls.

You get the story from Alice and Howard’s perspectives. In the first section—Alice’s part—you can see her unravelling. Howard tries to pull her out of her depression, but she has sunk too far to emerge.

The second section, after Alice is imprisoned, is from Howard’s point of view. He is somehow managing to keep everything going, but it is hard without Alice. Theresa starts to come by to take care of the girls and help out. She is suffering, not just from grief for her daughter but also because her husband Dan is angry and refuses talk about Lizzy. Howard and Theresa find in each other someone to whom they can talk openly.

The third and final section takes us back to Alice, and we get her story from prison: the women she was incarcerated with, the relationships she formed and what she went through.

This is the portrait of a marriage in all its complexity, one that is put under incredible pressure from events and the community that they live in. In spite of the fact that Alice and Howard are so unlike each other, their marriage has worked, although it has never seemed easy. The death of Lizzy, Alice’s depression, and the scandal at the school strains the marriage, and you’re never sure whether it is going to survive. Howard is one of those people who keeps going, no matter what, and he keeps trying to get Alice to do the same. But Alice needs much more than that, and Howard seems unable to provide it.

The court case plays out in detail, and you follow the ups and downs. This is a situation where if the accusations are true, they are extremely serious, but if they are false—as they are in this case—Alice still has to pay the price in the court of public opinion. Norman has clearly been coached, but he is just a child and there is no pleasure in watching him break down. 

The characters are well-drawn and completely believable. Alice’s unravelling is vividly described: you’re inside her head and can see it happening. Emma, who at the beginning of the book, tends to throw tantrums, suddenly seems to grow up after her mother is taken away. Then there is Howard’s connection not just to the farm but the land and its history—the sense that there is something bigger than him, that people have lived here for centuries and he is just one of a continuing line.

There are lyrical moments in the writing that made me stop and reread the sentence. Alice finally understands that, “the forgiveness itself was strong, durable, like strands of a web, weaving around us, holding us.”

This is a novel about dealing with the unforeseen, about trying to find the resources and strength to carry on, and the importance of the relationships that sustain us.