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Red Paint may bill itself as "the friendliest town in Maine," but Simon Howe, the owner and editor of the Red Paint Register, would be the first to admit that nothing much ever happens in it. All the same, his is a valued presence in town. At the Red Paint Area Rotarian dinner, he listens to a capsule biography that explains why he is being honoured that evening: "A decade ago, the Register was going bankrupt....Red Paint was in danger of losing its voice. Simon Howe gave up a promising career as a reporter in Portland to return to his roots after his folks died. We all know he used his inheritance to buy the paper and pay off its debts. It's not a glamorous job, editor of a small-town weekly." One is irresistibly reminded of another small-town American hero, George Bailey of It's a Wonderful Life but Simon's life is about to take off in a rather different direction, signalled by his receipt of a series of enigmatic, unsigned postcards from cities that come nearer and nearer to Red Paint. George Bailey, you will recall, is saved from suicide by his guardian angel, Clarence, who intervenes to convince his charge that his life indeed has meaning and worth. The postcard sender who disturbs the quiet tenor of Simon's life is very far from a guardian angel and he will shake Simon to his core. His name is Paul and he was married to the girl Simon took to his senior prom twenty-five years ago and, or so she believed, raped. She has recently killed herself, unable to recover from that sexual assault and Paul is here to make Simon pay. The lead-up to the first confrontation between Simon and Paul is creepingly menacing, but once the antagonists come into contact, the tension leaks out of the novel. It becomes more of a discussion piece about the nature of rape. Simon's wife is a therapist specializing in aiding women victims of sexual violence. She is uncompromising on the matter of rape and dismisses as irrelevant Simon's weak defences of what he keeps saying he barely remembers. In her view, all men are potential rapists, and though she is appalled that her husband of fifteen years turns out to be no exception, she is not surprised. Although the author is meticulous in his attempt to present the conflict between husband and wife, Simon is so much more fully presented, we are so privy to his internal conflicts that, weak though his protestations might be, he has the weight of the argument. It all begins to sound like a pocket outline of a one-act David Mamet play. Was what Simon did all those years ago no more really than the product of late adolescent sexual curiosity and too much to drink? Why did the young woman not make more of an effort over the years to recover, instead (at least as far as we know) subsiding into a kind of frozen victimhood? Why did she marry Paul only to make him (as he tells it) into a kind of rapist himself? And finally, is Simon's act of reparation at the end one more designed to free himself not so much of guilt than of the town of Red Paint, his wife, and his rather annoying young son? The jacket copy for REUNION AT RED PAINT BAY informs us that this is "more than a conventional mystery or thriller." Harrar's earlier foray into the genre, THE SPINNING MAN, which also dealt with a respected man accused, possibly falsely, of a violent assault on a young woman, was billed as a "literary thriller," a term that tends to strike fear in the heart of any reviewer of crime fiction. I have not read THE SPINNING MAN, though it did receive high praise, but I suspect that the weaknesses of RED PAINT arise from the author's aspirations toward an art higher than the mere thriller. Regrettably, the ideas it puts in play are far from new and appear attached to characters rather than expressive of them. Thrillers may have their limitations, but endings filled with fashionable ambiguity are happily not one of them. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2013
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