The story begins in 1980, when Patsy MacLemoore, a young, brilliant and alcoholic history professor, is helping her dashing boyfriend Brice take care of his pre-teen niece, Joey, a task that mostly involves Patsy filling the girl with booze and pills and giving her an inept ear-piercing. A year later, Patsy wakes up in jail to discover that she has hit and killed two Jehovah's Witnesses, a mother and daughter, while driving in a drunken blackout. Patsy, who remembers nothing, pleads guilty and is given a two-year sentence in prison. There, Patsy joins AA and begins what will be a decades-long relationship with the husband and father of her victims, which includes sending money to put the man's son through school. Patsy continues to walk the straight and narrow after her release; never touching alcohol again, reuniting with Brice (as a friend this time, since Brice has subsequently come out as gay), devoting herself to charity work, including the care of AIDS patients, and ultimately marrying an older, wealthy man who has long been a pillar of the AA community.
From her incarceration--perhaps the most brilliantly written and observed scenes in a novel full of them--through the next 20 years of her life, Patsy searches for a way to atone for the crimes that haunt her every day. She sheds the life, personality and spirit that defined her before the accident and recreates herself as a "good" person, one who little resembles the good-time girl she had been. So when the now 30something Joey, with whom Patsy has remained friends, arrives with some shocking new information about what really happened on the night of the accident, Patsy's world is shaken to its core and she is forced to reevaluate her identity and values.
Huneven is an extraordinary writer and this is a novel full of quiet surprises with a narrative so smooth and exquisitely crafted that it transcends the act of reading and becomes experiential. The kind of nuance, thoughtfulness and detail that Huneven brings to her characters, story and Southern California setting is so rare and worth savoring. Blame lingers in the imagination long after its final page.--Debra Ginsberg
Shelf Talker: A brilliantly written and deeply engrossing novel about the effects of guilt and the quest for goodness.