M.O. Walsh’s recently published debut novel, My Sunshine Away, pulls no punches. Early in the book, a fifteen-year-old girl is violated on a sidewalk in her seemingly safe Baton Rouge neighborhood; assaulted from behind, she can’t describe her attacker. Some suspects are likelier than others—the reform-school kid, the weird neighbor—but any male old enough could have done it, including the narrator. The narrator’s schoolboy crush on the victim becomes tinged with obsession; and as the years pass he and the victim develop a mercurial, secret relationship that fails to fulfill their mutual need to understand what happened.
Centering a crime novel on a rape that the victim survives is a savvy decision. Murder, the usual choice, has an attractive narrative finality: a life ends, a mystery begins. Rape, though, is uncomfortable and harder to discuss, and the survival of the victim keeps the crime before the community’s eyes—”a girl I know” commands more attention than “a girl I once knew.” With the victim and most of the suspects still living their lives on the same street, suspicion also has more opportunities to fester.
Without giving much away, I can say that when the assailant’s identity is revealed, it feels fair. Walsh doesn’t resort to a cheap trick like “… and we never really knew what happened” or “… and it turns out, it was just a passing lunatic with no connection to us at all!” While not a conventional mystery, My Sunshine Away follows the genre’s rules while adding opportunities for deeper reflection than are available in a standard whodunit; and the structure works.
If you’ve read this column before, you’ll know that the way to my heart is through a good throwaway line, and Walsh drives right for the thorax. Alaska is described as a place where “the dogs were all beautiful and the women all rabid,” and a drunk kid claims to be on Quaaludes because he thinks they sound mysterious. Walsh also has a knack for conjuring absurd situations that just might be true: when the narrator is questioned about the rape, there’s a short, tense who’s-on-first exchange because he’s only heard “rape” used in the context of humiliating sports losses—”I don’t understand. Who was she playing?” It would be funny with any other word, but with the whispered, loaded “rape,” it becomes an irrational talisman for the narrator’s mother, who, when confronted with her son’s brief status as an official suspect, reasons that someone who doesn’t know the word can’t perform the act.
Baton Rouge-born Walsh also takes time to reflect on the city and its relationship to its louder, flashier sister, New Orleans. The book would be worth buying only for the several-page digression, late in the book, about the relationship between these two towns, the Martha and Mary of Louisiana’s cities. New Orleans is bawdy and eccentric, the roommate who always has gin but never has rent, while “Baton Rouge is a city whose problems, on a statistical level, are largely predictable … [and that] normally ranks around thirty-seventh in the top one hundred metropolitan areas of America, no matter what you are measuring.” The pleasant, neighborly city Walsh describes sounds like a great place to live, full of good restaurants, bloom-heavy gardens, and dignity in its own right; but even a native’s praise can’t escape the “… and you know, it’s just seventy miles …” refrain familiar to all of us with a connection to good old Red Stick. The perfect irony here is, of course, that during the writing of My Sunshine Away Walsh left Baton Rouge to take a position at the University of New Orleans.
Here’s what keeps me from turning this review into a full-on rave: the material isn’t really original. The execution is stunning, but My Sunshine Away takes as its themes two tropes that novelists have passed back and forth for years. Recite them with me: (1) child learns about the world by being in the vicinity of a shocking crime; (2) teenage boy loves girl from afar for years but It Can’t Be, for whatever reason. After the first few pages, I thought, “Oh, God, it’s chicken-fried Virgin Suicides” and put it down until I felt I could handle such a thing. I was wrong, but not as wrong as I wish I had been. It’s not that these are bad themes, even; they’re just very familiar. There’s a fine line between universality and triteness, and Walsh stays on the right side of it—but you can see the line from where he stands. I look forward to Walsh’s next book, when he might bring his powerful gifts to bear on a fresher topic.
