Count on Christina Schwarz to tackle the ties that bind -- family, friendship, marriage -- and their unraveling in spite of themselves. Like her first two novels, "So Long at the Fair" is a thriller and a mystery as well as character-driven literary fiction.
Here, the starring players are a woman named Freddi; a married couple, Ginny and Jon; and Freddi's friend Ethan in a crucial supporting role.
Ethan is in love with Freddi. He's planning to marry her, never mind that she thinks they're just good friends. When the reader first meets him he's bothered, because Freddi "hung up the phone so abruptly, without even saying goodbye."
Of course the reader was privy to that call in a previous chapter, knows that Freddi tried not once but several times to end the call and that Ethan wouldn't let her off the phone.
We know too, although Ethan does not, that she's rushing to get ready for Jon, who's just arrived at her place for some weekend delight.
It's not giving anything away to say that Ethan's behavior smacks of pathological. He keeps binoculars in his glove compartment. He drives over to spy on Freddi after she hangs up. He parks in "what he'd come . . . to think of as his usual spot."
But when he sees Jon standing outside, he's relieved. Freddi works with Jon, which explains, in Ethan's mind, her behavior on the phone: "[I]t was awkward to conduct a personal conversation in front of a colleague."
Ethan is clueless, and Ethan is trouble, and we keep turning pages. In the hands of a writer as skillful as Schwarz, it isn't necessarily a matter of who; the what and where, how and why are more than enough to keep us engaged.
As demonstrated in "Drowning Ruth," an Oprah Book, and the critically acclaimed "All Is Vanity," Schwarz is good with place, character, and bringing the lens disturbingly and deliciously close.
Here's Ethan after a date and a chaste goodbye from Freddi: "Driving home, he thought about her kiss. What had it meant? He pulled his teeth over his lips, top and bottom, as if they were artichoke leaves."
And Jon, momentarily disenchanted with his lover: "She had a strangely small head, he noticed for the first time. He felt an urge to give it a little squeeze, as if juicing an orange."
Schwarz is also good at suspense. Two stories, inextricably tangled, unspool in "So Long at the Fair" in alternating chapters. In present-day Madison, Wis., Ginny and Jon are long-married and have all but given up on conceiving a child. Jon, as noted, is cheating with Freddi, his work mate in an advertising firm.
