What Happened (review)

This taut, nonlinear tale chronicles the narrator's experience when the car he and his brother are riding in hits a bicyclist during a January snowstorm. The driver, Duane, is a privileged rich kid who's afraid of his powerful father's wrath and who wants to flee the scene; when the narrator and his brother, Kyle, get out to check on the victim and report the accident, Duane takes off (Kyle and his brother also leave the scene after calling the police and trying to protect the unconscious man from further injury). Now Duane's father wants Kyle and his brother to take responsibility for the accident and keep Duane's record clear, and he has considerable influence: he's also the father of Kyle's girlfriend, Emily, and he makes it known that he has considerable information about the boys' dead mother and abandoning dad. Johnson deftly sets up the story's fragmented nature by allowing his narrator to announce it at the start ("If my story seems erratic it's because I think that way"), yet the story is actually pretty representative of the way experiences can fly by in the face of a life-changing incident. Attuned readers will realize that the disparity in fortune between Duane and the brothers, which Duane's father takes every chance to point out, is ultimately far more unfair than Duane's dad's sleazy proposal, and that the brothers' refusal of the proposal is a statement about themselves as well. This is therefore a drama that will provoke ethical and philosophical questioning not only about the central crisis but about the life paths that brought these boys to this moment in the first place.