SOME BRIGHT NOWHERE

A woman with terminal cancer stops treatment—and it gets complicated from there.

Don’t expect a have-a-good-cry-and-catharsis tale from Packer, who excels in diamond-hard dissections of tangled personal relations. She embeds the narrative in the perceptions of Eliot, who is blindsided when his wife, Claire, tells him that she wants her two best friends to take care of her in these final months, “instead of you.” It seems an unbelievably cruel demand; Eliot has been her caretaker through nearly nine grim years. He agrees, confident that “Holly and Michelle would need him for the bad moments…Claire would need him. She couldn’t see it now.” This thought should be a clue that there’s more going on here than a dying woman’s caprice, and the hints pile up from there in stray comments by friends, the couple’s adult children, and Eliot’s own recollections of past moments of tension in what was unquestionably a loving marriage. A retired management consultant, he wants to manage situations and avoid conflict: “You’re like…amenable,” says son Josh. “Except when you’re not.” Packer mercilessly prods Eliot toward enlightenment about his character and Claire’s feelings. Readers are likely to share his frustration with his wife’s attitude, which can be summarized as, “If you don’t get it, I can’t explain it,” until they realize she’s just too sick to deal with other people’s issues. Nothing is simple in a Packer novel: Emotional and power dynamics among Eliot, Holly, and Michelle shift on a near-daily basis, while Claire at the center keeps insisting that her decision has nothing to do with her love for her husband, and Josh and sister Abby referee from the sidelines. The final pages are as deliberately unresolved as the rest of the novel. Packer’s unsparing gaze would be hard to take if her characters weren’t so believably, messily, hurtfully human.

Harrowing, but brilliant.