In Reservation Road, we focused on the innocent Learner family whose young son is killed in a tragic accident. As it begins, this latest work has too much anger, too much violence, too many sexual scenes (that seem to fall from the sky without context), and is filled with too many unlikable individuals. I got the impression that Schwartz had written this having in mind someone at an airport shop, thirteen or fourteen months from now, who picks up the trade paperback version and wants to be sure there’s enough action in it to fill a flight from the west coast to Atlanta. There was a sense of quiet determination in the earlier novels, tales that were populated with good people experiencing bad things.Īll of this has changed with Northwest Corner, which starts off as too loud and too busy. In Reservation Road and The Commoner, Schwartz insisted that the reader be patient, promising that the effort would be paid in full at the end of these novels.
Reservation Road was a tale of psychological suspense, and Schwartz’s strength was in building and maintaining that suspense. The bad news is that, well, there’s a lot of it… If you loved the novel, or the film version of, Reservation Road the good news is that Northwest Corner revisits the original characters approximately twelve years later. “Too bad, isn’t it, how the things that one has so long prayed for never do happen the way one wants them to, and never without a price.” “The promises they made to each other were hastily scribbled IOUs…” Northwest Corner: A Novel by John Burnham Schwartz (Random House, $26.00, 285 pages)
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