Who Killed Christopher Goodman? by Allan Wolf (review)

In this novel in multiple voices, Wolf returns to an episode from his youth—the murder of a high school neighbor—with an eye toward probing the sadness, confusion, and vague guilt of the teens who knew the victim. Blacksburg, Virginia is recast as Goldsburg, fictional names have been assigned to real and composite characters in the drama, and the events of the weeks leading up to the killing are told from six key players, some in free-verse poetry and some in prose. The true crime core of the novel is its strength, and as the inevitable event closes in, readers gradually understand that victim Christopher Goodman was never a target, just a kid who stumbled into the crosshairs of a pair of chemically altered social misfits at the wrong time, and the randomness of the act makes it all that more painful. The framing device, in which a high school language arts teacher assigns her students to write poems examining their reactions to Goodman’s killing, is awkwardly attached to the chronologically arranged accounts, but the tangled interrelationships among the teens are thoroughly believable, and readers will find plenty of intrigue in their aggregated points of view.