'Red Hook Road': Exploring a tragedy's effects on two families

By Ayelet Waldman

Doubleday. 343 pp. $25.95

As a photographer tries to assemble everyone for a family photo, we see everything that the camera could not capture: The flower girl tearfully looking for her basket, the groom's father behind the church smoking a cigarette, and hungover young guests. This is our introduction to the as-yet-unnamed cast of characters in Red Hook, a picturesque seacoast town in Maine.

The second chapter brings us into the wedding reception and gives the characters' names. Into the festively decorated Grange Hall come the police, with the news that the bride and groom have been killed when their limousine crashed on its way to the reception.

After that melodramatic setup, the rest of the novel explores the effects of the tragedy on members of each family. Structuring the book around four consecutive summers mirrors the resort identity of the town and effectively shows time passing.

The bride and groom, portrayed as a golden couple, brought together two contrasting families - the working-class Tetherlys, year-round residents of the town, and the privileged Copakens, Jewish New Yorkers who spend each summer in Red Hook.

Iris, the bride's mother, plays up her ancestral ties to the town, but most permanent residents still consider her an outsider. The differences between the two families play out in burial customs, as well as in further interactions. By shifting points of view, Waldman gives us an inside look at how surviving members of each family process grief, from anger to bewilderment.

Though Waldman shows Jane, the groom's mother, ferociously cleaning houses for a living, she focuses mostly on the Copakens (to complicate things, they are among Jane's clients). Iris, an accomplished professor accustomed to controlling everyone around her, falls apart when she is faced with a situation she could not have possibly predicted. Her husband, Daniel, returns to boxing, a sport he loved before he was married, which propels him away. Their surviving daughter questions the academic fast track her mother has pushed her to follow, falling, perhaps inevitably, into the arms of the groom's somewhat lost younger brother.