Loving but judgmental Carmen and skittish but fundamentally sound Alice have their own odysseys to pursue Carmen’s evolving relationships with Gabe, son from her first marriage, and with Rob, the second husband who’s not at all what she thought she wanted, are particularly sensitively drawn. Not since Roxana Robinson’s Cost (2008) has a novel so bluntly depicted the impact of addiction on a family, but that isn’t the whole story here. Instead, she quietly follows her characters through the usual stuff of growing up and growing older: marriages, breakups, material success and spiritual uncertainty. Nick, Alice and Carmen are all haunted by memories of the dead girl-Alice knows her series of paintings of Casey are her best work but refuses to show them-yet Anshaw doesn’t suggest the accident fundamentally changed the arcs of their lives her understanding of human fallibility and existential contingency is too subtle for that kind of artistic determinism. Olivia, the stoned driver, goes to jail and straightens up for a while after she gets out, it seems she’ll keep Nick in line, but he loves getting high too much. At least Carmen produces a child, while Alice has made the mistake of competing with their father Horace, an egocentric, domineering painter. His sister Carmen, whose marriage to Matt sets the plot in motion (and doesn’t last long), is a political activist, marginally more acceptable to their deeply conventional mother Loretta than sibling Alice, an artist and lesbian who suffers an agonizing passion for Matt’s sexually conflicted sister Maude. Nick’s growing addiction is one of the subplots in a tender but often somber story centered on his family. It’s no accident that the driver of the car that kills 10-year-old Casey Redman is the extremely stoned girlfriend of Nick, brother of the bride. From a 1983 wedding through Election Day 2008, Anshaw ( Lucky in the Corner, 2002, etc.) tracks a Chicago family unsettled by a fatal accident.

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw