Death Of The Black-Haired Girl
by Robert Stone
Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2015
Date Read: May 6, 2022
A young college girl is killed in a hit-and-run but the questions is: Was it an accident or murder? The more her life is exposed, the reader realizes that there are a lot of people who could have wished her harm.
Maud Stack attends an upper-crust-East Coast college and is in her senior year, working on her final thesis. She has begun to find her voice but the one thing that is causing her pain is her thesis advisor, Professor Steven Brookman. He is not only her advisor, but her lover as well. Brookman is married, with a child on the way and knows he needs to end things with Maud. She’s just so damned compelling that he keeps not doing what he knows he needs to do. Eventually, however, he does man-up and tell her that his wife is coming back into town and it needs to end. Maud is devastated.
The daughter of a retired detective, Maud’s education was nearly out of reach for her father, Ed Stack. As a favor to Ed, an ex-colleague, Charlie, has agreed to fund the extra costs that Maud’s scholarships wouldn’t cover as a favor. I never fully understood this thread but it was implied that Charlie was definitely on the take, if not hooked up with the mob. It’s unclear if Maud knew where the extra spending money was coming from.
The third reason someone might wish her dead is an opinion article she just published in the college’s newspaper. Taking on the issue of abortion (how prescient in light of this week’s leak of the draft that would overturn Roe vs. Wade), Maud mocks the anti-abortion protestors at the nearby hospital and their infringement on women’s rights. This article pissed off a lot of people from the Right-To-Lifers to the Catholic clergy.
One night, drunk and depressed, Maud finds herself in front of Professor Brookman’s house screaming at him and his family. Brookman goes outside to calm her down and a brief tussle ensues whereby Maud yanks herself away from him and ends up in the street, right in front of a speeding car. Maud is killed instantly.
Her death affects just about everyone at the college - Brookman and his family, the health nurse, Jo, Maud’s father Ed. Her passing causes each of these people to re-evaluate their past and changes the course of their lives. After a decade of sobriety, Ed begins drinking again and follows Maud into the grave a few months after her death. Jo looks back into her past and finds herself on shaky religious ground. Brookman is summarily fired, forgiven by his wife and embarks on a new field of research.
What makes this novel interesting is how each of these characters are affected by a one-of-hundreds student who wasn’t particularly close to any one of these people, including Brookman and her father. An interesting read but not earth shattering.
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