The story of the novel "The Little Friend" is not that here is where the boy was killed, but here his sister is trying to find the murderer, and between these two events there are some pictures and conversations that somehow combine all this into one readable scheme. The plot of the novel "Little Friend" - it is not a smooth line, diluted with ups and downs of the plot rhythm. This, if you will, many, many separate threads, which with each new page of the novel are gradually pulled together in one ball, in the center of which is a lonely book child - arrogant, arrogant, terribly unloved girl Harriet. Harriet's death by itself - apart from the general atmosphere - is not important, any event could be a catalyst for what happened to her next, and it happens to her the most terrible thing that can happen to a homeless child - growing up.
Harriet grows up in a rather crowded family, which is forever broken and scattered by a huge tragedy - the death of a child. Family before that was prone to mythologization of the world, endless aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and cousins as if they had frozen in the nineteenth century, in the post-apocalyptic world, which happened after they were defeated by the Yankees - Yankees with harsh voices and bad manners. Despite the fact that the action takes place in the mid-seventies of the twentieth century, sometimes in the novel comes a distinct sense of indomitable nineteenth century: There's a smell of vetiver on the mantelpiece shelves, darkened photographs, all of them including children, remembering what Aunt Libby was drawing for still life when she was at the beginning of the century studying at the Academy of Arts for decent girls, and everybody is talking about it all the time. Something happens as the older Cleves, like spiders, grasp the information and tenaciously braid its smoky memories, turning it into a nice temporary cocoon: tomorrow they do not exist, because they always live in the perfect, golden, smelling vetiver yesterday's day.
And in such a world, the girl Harriet grows up. Her father - a nasty, fiery man, a clear predecessor of Larry Decker - lives with his mistress in another city, maintaining the visibility of family life solely for the sake of elderly relatives. Her mother has been on tranquilizers for ten years and, to tell the truth, she died the day her eldest son died. The older sister, the only witness to the disaster, was so traumatized that she fell into some existential swamp, mostly made up of dreams and dreams. Harriet - a lively, agile and very curious girl - was basically left alone in the world. She doesn't love anyone because she doesn't have anyone else to love. In the whole book, Harriet has two people to whom she feels unskilled, inexpressible, unfamiliar to her love - their housekeeper Ida and her eldest cousin Libby, but further, adult life, sorry for the spoiler, will take away from her and them.
Harriet grows up, growing up without knowing how to do it. Not that anyone could do it at all, but Harriet never lived in real life, she grew up in a world that was invented and told for her by her aunts - with a fictional older brother, with stories about the former greatness of the house of Clive, with all these ritual mourning services with bells, carpets, chandeliers, stuccoes and arrows, which tried to kill her great-grandfather. And when the inevitable moment comes when the world is redeemed, when Harriet starts to panic. She doesn't know how to live, she has no purpose in life, she wants to be Jeanne d'Arc and Houdini, and around her blossoms pushy puberty peers, her own body is about to betray her, the girls grow up and do not become Houdini, they, to Harriet's horror, become wives, dancers or nurses, but then still wives. And then Harriet, in an attempt to stay forever in the perfect, told for her world, inventing a similar, little to do with reality goal - to find the killer of his brother. Twelve years have passed since Robin died. When he died, Harriet was six months old. The investigation came to a standstill - and to tell the truth, Tart in the novel a few times so gently reveals a hint that this and the murder, it was not.
And here begins one of the most terrible and beautiful novels of adulthood, which could only be invented - a big, big story about how Harriet tried to cling to the book, history, the story, to stay forever in his twelve years and never once, never once met with a gaze with the terrible understanding that real life has no plot. The real-life, sunk, however, in the multicolored drug parishes, unfolds almost next to Harriet - in the family of Ratliffs - with poverty, violence and a bunch of relatives, who before you (unlike the relatives of Harriet) to you oh as it is the case. And actually all these different, differently designed threads of the plot at the end and get tangled in a single ball in the very place where the two of these worlds are bent and Harriet inevitably grows up.
This is, of course, a novel about death, but not about Robin's death. It is about the painful, storyless death of an inner child, and this may be even more terrible