WOLF AT THE TABLE

A literate, gothic tale of murder, madness, and intergenerational conflict.

Rapp’s latest opens with a central mystery: A young man wanders into a small town in 1951, identifies himself to 13-year-old Myra Lee Larkin as Mickey Mantle, and commits a triple murder worthy of Charles Starkweather. He disappears, leaving a familial memory that will endure, in the form of whispers and a baseball card, for the next half century. Myra, a good Catholic girl who tries to hold to her faith, is one of six children who inevitably drift apart. One, Alec, presents a foreboding figure early on: “His soaked hair makes him seem sinful and ghoulish.” Everyone in Myra’s life, it seems, is touched by mental illness: her father, an uncommunicative war veteran; her free-spirit sister, who tries on every fad of the 1960s; her husband, a straight shooter who descends into schizophrenia, convinced that a light bulb is ordering him to kill Myra and their son, who grows over the years to be both a successful writer and a man himself in need of psychiatric medication; Myra’s grandson, who has apocalyptic visions of cloudscapes. And then there’s brother Alec, whose career opens in this book with a spasm of bloodshed, many more of which punctuate the narrative. Rapp can write up a storm, but the story he presents, as his characters attempt to understand one another over the course of their lives, is relentlessly gloomy and violent, as if channeling the spirit of Cormac McCarthy. It’s improbable, too: Except in fiction, the chance of being surrounded by that much mental illness seems vanishingly small. Still, willing suspension of disbelief and all, Rapp is a sharp and witty observer (“Their father is staring at his plate as if the ham will provide a solution”), and his narrative commands attention.

A beautifully told but relentlessly grim tale that ends well for almost no one.