Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
Down the Darkest Road
by Tami Hoag, Penguin, 2011
Reviewed by Larry W. Riggs
Tami Hoag's new novel includes some of the
best writing and most acute psychological analysis I have seen in
popular fiction. Four years after the disappearance and, almost
certainly, the murder of her teenage daughter, Lauren Lawton is
obsessed with "justice," or is it revenge? Since the disappearance,
Lauren's husband has died in a car accident-a suicide?-and, in the
complete absence of hard evidence, the police have come to dread
Lauren's demands for vigorous pursuit of the man who, everyone
seems morally certain, kidnapped the young woman. Hoag explores
this direst of imaginable psychological, moral, and legal
predicaments with impressive lucidity and sensitivity. In her
obsessive quest for justice/revenge-and for knowledge of her
daughter's ultimate fate-Lauren has evolved from victim to
predator, following the man who, legally, cannot even be called a
suspect, to a new town. One of the many tragic dimensions of this
drama is that Lauren has victimized her own younger daughter by
sacrificing the docile, obedient girl's most critically formative
years to the ghost of her rebellious, irresponsible older sister.
Uprooted and too often ignored, the younger daughter has come to
hate her kidnapped sister and, of course, to feel devastated by
guilt. Is Lauren's quarry actually guilty? Is the quest worth its
consequences? Do the legal system's constraints justify
vigilantism? Will what is left of Lauren's family survive? Hoag's
book explores all of these questions.
- Larry W. Riggs is Professor of French at Butler
University.