"This is before the accident. No one is dead yet. Blood circulates just as it should, two ounces per pump of the heart."
So begins the extraordinary story of Carter Clay, a Vietnam veteran at loose ends. Drunk and driving a van down a Florida highway, Clay smashes into the Alitz family: Joe and Katherine, distinguished paleontologists, ad their daughter, Jersey. Joe is killed, Katherine and Jersey are seriously injured. In an attempt to redeem himself while still concealing his culpability, Clay becomes a questionable caretaker of Katherine and Jersey's damaged lives. He obtains a job as an aide at the hospital where Katherine and Jersey initially receive care. When Katherine's retired mother assumes reluctant responsibility for the pair, Clay further insinuates himself into their lives--imposing upon precocious Jersey and addled Katherine the baggage of his past and his haphazard faith in God. Suspenseful, psychologically complex, and inhabited by characters that will haunt your memory long after you have turned the last page, Carter Clay is a magnificent novel--a finely wrought tale of the frailty of identity and the possibility of redemption.
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The novel begins with a horrific accident in which Jersey is severely injured, her mother, Katherine, brain-damaged, and her father killed. The driver is Carter Clay, 42 years old and with "the face of a choirboy." This man has been sober for just a year, ever since his near-fatal stabbing while he was homeless in Sarasota, Florida. Having been given a second chance at life, he has religiously attended AA meetings, and has even come to believe that his craving for alcohol has diminished to manageable proportions: "Suffice it to say that Carter did not understand this appearance of diminution to be largely a feature of distance, as with a great warship that might be covered by the tip of your little finger when the vessel sits on the far horizon."
Then a minor accident sends him to a hospital, where a painkiller is prescribed to him that triggers those old cravings. Before long he is on a collision course, literally and spiritually, with the Alitz family. In the aftermath of the hit-and-run, M.B. reluctantly agrees to care for her injured daughter and granddaughter but soon finds she won't have to do it alone: Carter has decided he must make reparation by caring for his victims himself. But as his obsession with doing right by Katherine and Jersey grows, he may be doing more harm than good. Elizabeth Evans builds this complex and compelling tale with an authority many veteran novelists would envy. --Alix Wilber
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