Charlie Crosby, the protagonist of Enon, is the grandson of George Crosby from Paul Harding's Pulitzer-winning Tinkers. Like that novel, Enon is set in New England, but everything else has changed. In one year of Charlie's life, we see the ravages wrought by the death of his 13-year-old daughter, Kate, killed by a car while riding her bike. A week after the funeral, his wife, Susan, goes to visit her family in Minnesota; that is the last he sees of her.
Charlie's grief is monumental, self-destructive and nearly fatal. In an outburst of rage and helplessness, he breaks the bones in his hand punching through a wall. Now he requires pain medication just to function. Through it all, Harding captures the times that Charlie and Kate spent together--feeding birds, going for walks, talking about everything--so we know what he has lost.
One night, looking for drugs, he breaks into the house of a very old woman, Mrs. Hale, who upbraids him. When he apologizes for being in her house, she tells him: "Well and fine, Mr. Crosby, but your sorrows are selfish.... I should think you would be grateful for the blessing of having had a lovely child. Enough is enough."
He hears this oracular pronouncement and thinks: "I realized that what I had been doing since Kate's death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but the deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death." He is finally able to come back to some kind of life. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.