Ground Zero

Edward Falco's highly anticipated fourth novel explores the aftermath of violence, a subject Falco has had ample opportunity to study. Seung-Hui Cho, the man responsible for the death of thirty-two Virginia Tech students on April 16, 2007, was a student in Falco's playwriting class. But those looking for a recreation of the events of that tragic day will be disappointed by Falco's nuanced consideration of how acts of irredeemable violence shape the lives of the survivors.

The novel opens on a bucolic college campus not unlike Virginia Tech, but the scene is that of a party, not a massacre. A pair of young female coeds named Avery and Melanie hook up with Zach and Grant, a football player and an intense-looking stranger. Although Falco makes it clear that it's unusual for these girls to engage in erotic pursuits in so cavalier a manner, the prose is awkward and clunky as Falco tries a little too hard to make the women sound authentic:

When they were out of sight, Melanie said, "Av! You're not!""I think so," Av said. "I think I am.""A-ver-y!""What?" Avery said. "It'll be fun.""Fun? Jesus. He's a monster."

Thankfully, this banter doesn't go on for long, and the women get their men in perfunctory fashion, almost as if they didn't have a say in the matter. After having her fun, Avery evicts the snoring monster from her apartment and finds Grant watching television in the living room. An uncomfortable tête-à-tête ensues until Avery agrees to go for a ride on the back of Grant's motorcycle. The journey is described in a strange and hyper-real manner and culminates in a shockingly violent sexual encounter at a lake.

Was the sex consensual? Did Avery enjoy it? Avery isn't sure, and she finds the uncertainty alluring. As Avery wrestles with these questions and their implications, she commits an act of even greater violence by publicly revealing her tryst with Grant to Melanie, ruining her friendship and her reputation in one fell swoop. With nowhere to go and no one to turn to, Avery talks Grant into taking her with him back to New York City.

Avery's is just one of three storylines that comprises Saint John of the Five Boroughs. The second concerns Avery's mother, Kate, a widow who pines for her dead husband's married younger brother Hank, and the third explores Hank's wife Lindsey's troubled relationship with the men in her life: her distant husband; her young son Keith; her declining farther Arthur, a veteran of WWII; and her impulsive younger brother Ronnie, a soldier serving in Iraq. These stories are anchored in Salem, Virginia, a town so small it's even more of a fishbowl than the college campus Avery flees. Everyone is perfectly miserable but about to become much more so. Around the time Avery makes her decision to figuratively blow up her life, a very real explosion tears through Ronnie's vehicle while on patrol in Iraq, and the blast sends shockwaves that can be felt all the way in Virginia.

Detail from cover

The book's second section is only fifteen pages long but lets the reader in on what's going on in the head of the mysterious stranger that has so thoroughly disrupted Avery's life. Grant is a performance artist with a troubled past (as if there was any other kind) who is part of a close-knit group of exceptional New York City artists. Grant, too, is exceptional but for reasons that are not immediately clear:

It was because he was different and had been different for years at that point, this was some time after the killing and so he was separate from them and still a part of them, laughing with them, passing bottles around like communion, but it was because of the separation, because of the distance that he could...