"Pictures of You"

“Pictures of You” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011), by Caroline Leavitt, starts out with -- literally –- a bang. A car crash in the fog has one fleeing wife accidentally hitting and killing another. The surviving woman is devastated, as are the dead woman’s husband and son. Despite this dramatic start, the novel proceeds in fits and starts, and –- dare I say it –- drags for most of the book. It picks up a bit at the end, but never manages to be as compelling as its premise promises. There is a lot of mystery about things that turn out to be not all that mysterious. All the characters seem immobilized, and although the reader sympathizes with them, it is hard to feel very involved with them. The character of April, the woman who dies, is so contradictory, with no bridge between the two sides of her character, that she is almost unbelievable as a character. The most interesting and touching character is Sam, April’s nine year old son; Sam gradually grows to love Isabelle, the woman who survives, first as an “angel” and then as a sort of surrogate mother, but this does not work out. There is a lovely coda to the book, a sort of belated reward to the reader who has made it to the end of the novel, but by that time, it is a matter of too little, too late.