Published by Picador on January 9, 2018
In 1982, when Patrick is twelve years old, his friend Matthew ties a girl named Hannah to a tree and shoots her dozens of times with a BB gun. Patrick does nothing to stop it. One of the BBs enters her eye and, as far as the boys can tell, kills her. That afternoon shapes the rest of Patrick’s life.
In 2008, Patrick is unemployed. He spends his days testing and blogging recipes. He has violent fantasies about the man who fired him, and has in fact begun to stalk him. Patrick is being treated for anxiety but his condition cannot match his wife’s. Her nightmares are relentless; she needs therapy more than Patrick. Still, Patrick’s therapist asks him to write about his past, and it is from that writing that we learn about the events of Patrick’s childhood.
At some point, Patrick’s past and present intertwine and the reader wonders how Patrick will cope with the flood of stressors that confront him. After a third of the story has been told, the novel shifts to Hannah’s point of view as she tells her true crime story, deliberately mimicking the techniques of In Cold Blood — if Capote had been recalling his life as a twelve-year-old girl. That’s the least successful segment of the novel. Hannah’s voice never struck me as genuine.
The novel changes points of view and time frames several times before the reader hears from Matthew, whose perspective adds another layer to the reader’s evolving understanding of the events that shaped the characters. Pretty much every life in Grist Mill Road is touched by violence, most of it senseless. And pretty much everyone in the novel is keeping a secret, a couple of which involve murders. Of course, in fiction as in life, secrets will out, and their revelations inspire most of the novel’s drama. The danger in the approach is that the secrets, once revealed, will seem melodramatic or too coincidental to accept. Grist Mill Road approaches both of those lines but never crosses them. Christopher Yates keep control of his material at all times, producing a story that is reasonably convincing.
None of the central characters deserve what they get, but none of them deserve sainthood. Characterizations are strong and the plot takes surprising turns as it approaches an eventful ending, but the strength of Grist Mill Road is that the initial story seems simple, but with the addition of each new perspective, the seemly simple story gains weight and meaning. The story illustrates the limitations imposed by our own singular perspective — only by seeing the same events through the eyes of others can we approach a full understanding of those events. The way the different perspectives gradually reframe the story in the reader’s mind is my primary reason for recommending Grist Mill Road.
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