BOOKED Solid

"People have this idea that what they do changes who they are. A married man has an affair and he thinks, Now I’ve become a changed person. As if something had changed.

Meaning he already was a bad person?

Meaning bad isn’t the issue. Meaning you do what you do. Not without consequences for other people, of course, sometimes very grave ones. But it’s not helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves. They don’t define you as much as you define them. . .You’re already made, honey."

For Carrie Bell, the decision to leave was sudden yet inevitable for she was suffocating, even before the accident. Her home town of Madison, Wisc. held everything and everyone she had ever known, and for the year following college (also in Madison), she had become increasingly dissatisfied with her life. The lack of change from high school to college, college and beyond ate away at her, making it increasing difficult to bearound her core group of long-time friends. It was this same irritation at one friend in particular that preceded the dive, preceded the biggest change Carrie and all her friends could have imagined.

There always was a piece of Carrie that was missing, that led her to wonder about other places outside of Madison, places that could prove interesting enough to cancel out all responsibility. Her father had left Madison when Carrie was three, leaving daughter and wife behind and never contacting them again. Although she often wondered about this man as she grew, Carrie accepted to some degree the quiet life she had with her mother, supplementing it with her best friend, Jamie, and later, by ninth grade, with her boyfriend Mike and his family, too. But after eight years with Mike, Carrie twirls the engagement ring on her finger with less enthusiasm than she once did. She knew him, as it turned out, better than she knew herself.

The day started out less than perfect; Carrie and Mike had one of their silent fights on the way up to Clausen’s Pier for their friends’ annual Memorial Day picnic. When the couple arrived, everyone could sense the tension but tried to avoid it. Mike clowned around with a couple of the guys, suggested a dive into the early summer’s icy lake waters off the pier they occupy. The weather that particular spring had not been ordinary; it was as dry and expressionless as Carrie had felt, and the result was a much lower water line. Foolishly, recklessly, partly to counteract Carrie’s unspoken misery, Mike dove into the water, and he did not rise on his own.

Mike did not regain consciousness for weeks, and it became clear even before he woke that he was paralyzed. Carrie, shaken, feeling overwhelmed with guilt and future responsibility, limited her visits to the hospital and soon earned the scorn of friends and Mike’s family. After he awoke, Mike’s frustration, self-pity, and anger coupled with the feelings Carrie had even before the accident drove her further away. Always talented, she attempted to work out her confusion in the safety of her apartment, sewing complicated fabrics and patterns. While wandering through town one day, she met Simon, someone she knew only casually in high school, who had since relocated to New York. During his visit home, Simon told Carrie the freedom he felt since leaving Madison, he had come out to friends and family there but gay life in Madison couldn’t compare to New York and his friends from Yale. The two instantly felt a connection form between them. Simon saw in Carrie the same need for travel and change that he had satisfied in New York, and in Simon, Carrie identified a piece of herself much larger than Madison. Not so very long after Simon returned to his new home, Carrie quietly packed a bag, locked her apartment door, and left Madison without a word to anyone.

She arrived in New York and quickly claimed a small space in Simon’s group house. For the next few weeks, Carrie walked. She explored New York, its clothing stores, restaurants, fabric shops, by foot, circling closer each outing to screwing up the courage to enter a bar with a familiar name, one she had heard about from the only other person she had met in Madison who also lived in New York: Kilroy. Evasive, mysterious, quiet, ridiculously spare and frugal, Kilroy became everything Mike was not. Carrie was fascinated by his untouchable quality, yet increasingly frustrated and hurt by his secretive nature. As in Madison, Carrie sewed to create order in this world, and embraced the exotic silks and velvets she found in New York stores. The pieces she made, however, seemed to be for a life she did not yet have. As months pass with few phone calls home, Carrie became more accustomed to life in New York, less eager to visit or have contact with her life in Madison, even as she felt the distracting pull of her friendships, of Mike, there.

Eventually, Carrie was forced to confront the life she left behind before she can leave the indeterminate state she had come to accept as permanent. With a weekend’s worth of clothes, she skipped a few of her new fashion design classes at Parson’s and returned to Madison. She was not the only one who had changed, however, and the life she found in Madison is suddenly as strange as it is familiar. Her visits to Mike and other friends were as cold as her phone conversations with Kilroy, and Carrie prolonged her visit. Face to face with the feelings she left behind, Carrie realized she must finally make a decision.

This novel is a fascinating journey through the idea of responsibility and what it is like to find yourself buried somewhere in the middle of a mess of ideas about what is right and what is right for you. Carrie moves from being a likeable, but one-dimensional, small-town girl to an adult with a complex reality. Her evolution is slow, somewhat familiar, and not just a little surprising.