by Joseph Olshan;
Polis Books; 304 pages; $26
At the small-town bookstore where I once worked, there wasn’t much shelf space. But an entire wall of it was dedicated to mystery, a genre that — unlike the abstract lyricism of literary fiction, or the sudden rise and gradual fall of Fifty Shades of Grey — has remained consistently and immensely popular with the “mainstream” reader, whoever that may be. James Patterson, and his cadre of ghostwriters, filled nearly a whole shelf alone.
The mystery genre thrives on its gratifyingly familiar plot devices: loose-cannon cops, slangy dialogue, at least a couple of red herrings, a corpse. Often, there’s a romantic subplot. But that’s rarely the most fleshed-out part of the story, and rarer still for it to make a cogent and moving point about the difficulty of navigating a socially transgressive relationship. Say, one between a younger and a much older man, as in Black Diamond Fall, the 11th novel from Barnard-based writer Joseph Olshan, whose previous titles include Clara’s Heart, adapted into a film in 1988 with Whoopi Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris, and Cloudland, set in the Upper Valley.
Black Diamond Fall is, technically and structurally, a crime novel. But it inverts that hierarchy of storyline found throughout most of the genre: Because the narrative is just as concerned with characters’ interior realities as with their action and dialogue, the book is less of a mystery with an incidental B-plot, than an Upper Valley love story that happens to be organized around a crime.
The victim of that crime is Luc Flanders, a Norwich native and student at an elite Vermont college called Carleton (a barely-veiled Middlebury), who goes missing one February night after venturing out onto a frozen pond alone. The same night Luc disappears, vandals leave their mark on the Robert Frost Farm, with which Luc’s family has a long involvement.
At the time, Luc is grappling with his strong feelings for Sam Solomon, an architect and daredevil from South Woodstock who is nearly twice his age, and with whom he has recently ended a relationship. Nobody knew about it: “(T)he fact is now he lives in the world of college sports. It’s the last frontier to accept sexual diversity,” notes Luc’s father, when the truth begins to dawn on him. Meanwhile Sam, at 50, is trying desperately to hang onto his vitality, preoccupied with the worry that aging, for him, will mean aging alone.
Because an old hockey injury left Luc with strange neurological symptoms — hallucinations of religious music, dissociative episodes, hypersensitivity to art — locating him carries especially high stakes. The resulting investigation spreads out over the Upper Valley, among other places.
It’s always great fun to read a story set in a place you know, and Valley readers will recognize Olshan’s ample use of real geographical and cultural markers: the “drab” institutional brick buildings at Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center; the “desolately majestic” mountain views along Interstate 89 north of White River Junction; an art opening in Lebanon that can only be at AVA Gallery and Art Center. Luc’s father, a studio art professor at Dartmouth College, “hates the university’s politics, its rich-kid jock mentality, and is always insulted whenever students miss his class in favor of intramural sports.” One character refers to Bethel as “the meth hub of Vermont.” The Valley News even gets a mention.
The plot is loosely based on events to which the wintry Middlebury landscape did, in fact, bear witness: In 2008, during the college’s winter break, a student walked away from a campus gathering and disappeared into the night. Despite robust search efforts, he was not found for four months, his body pristine at the bottom of nearby Otter Creek. And the Frost Farm did see the wrath of some high school troublemakers.
Though in reality these two events are not, we can safely assume, related — they occurred two years apart — Olshan has manipulated the details to bind them together in a way that feels theoretically possible. Sam and Luc’s relationship, too, owes something to real-life circumstances: Olshan has said in interviews that he drew the Sam and Luc material from personal experience, and he manages to capture the sucker-punch of realizing the depth of one’s devotion to another, as well as the sense of helplessness when a series of misunderstandings cause it all to fall apart.
Though the novel’s pacing is occasionally choppy, it generally moves at a good clip and the smart but unpretentious language makes for an easy, one-sit read. By incorporating a same-sex romance into a novel that has such popular appeal, Olshan is helping to open up the genre, as well as the idea of what’s “mainstream”: As Luc reflects, in a lovely dreamlike passage, “(W)hile people like Taft and McKinnon (Luc’s friends at Carleton) joke harshly about men with men and make it sound like a depravity, he knows that there is a naturalness to it, a rightness, and that his wiring, his craving again, is almost spiritual in nature.” Such passages, which veer into lyricism but are careful not to sacrifice clarity for style, are where Olshan’s prose shines brightest.
And so Black Diamond Fall is not a traditional hard-boiled mystery so much as one that’s been delicately poached and served up with a kind of literary Hollandaise sauce: Its exploration of the messy, socially complicated, sometimes broken ways that we love each other is what gives the story its richness.
Which is all to say that Olshan’s latest work has earned its place on the genre’s bookshelf. Even if it means displacing a James Patterson title to make the space.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at emmajeanholley@gmail.com.