Blame

BLAME

by Michelle Huneven

 

Nominations: Dayton Literary Peace Longlist 2010, Dublin Longlist 2011, LA Times Finalist 2009, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2009

 

Date Read: September 12, 2020

 

Blame is an easy and entertaining read but to say that it stands out in any significant way would be an overstatement. Patsy is a professor with a blackout drinking problem. On one of these blackout sessions, she runs over two people – mother and daughter Jehovah’s Witnesses- while entering her driveway. She gets shipped off the prison for two years where she is forced to become sober.

 

I have to pause and say that her sentence is shocking. I can guarantee that if she were not a privileged white woman, she would have had a much longer sentence. Even still, she took two lives and gets paroled after two years. I just cannot let this sink in. Further, she is returning home after a night of drinking so why would Jehovah’s Witnesses be out that late pamphleting? I find it very difficult to swallow. 

 

Remarkably, Patsy is able to maintain her sobriety after leaving prison, thanks in large part to mandatory AA meetings. She comes home to an apartment that was lovingly assembled by her ex-boyfriend Bryce and his new lover Giles. Giles becomes a major presence in her life as he is also in AA and they find a loving chemistry that propels their friendship. They are available to each other in ways that others just aren’t.

 

SPOILER ALERT

After meeting and falling in love with Cal, a major player in the AA world, Patsy marries. Her marriage, while loving, is not everything she had hoped it would be and as time progresses, the age difference that was once not a factor becomes a significant issue. As Patsy is slowly realizing this, she learns of some earth-shattering news. Through a friend, she realizes that Patsy wasn’t driving the car when the two people were killed. A man she had picked up in a bar was driving and had fled the scene, leaving Patsy to take the rap. 

 

It becomes an interesting intellectual exercise determining how much responsibility Patsy still has for creating the circumstances that led to their deaths. She is still the one who drank until she blacked out. The man was driving her car and trying to enter her driveway. Then again, even when Patsy believed she had been the driver, I never felt that she truly felt the shock and horror of taking two lives, like it never fully sunk in. If I had killed two people, I would have had a much harder time with it than Patsy did.

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