Copyright Star Tribune
Ann Packer’s novel is about Claire, who is dying of cancer and who wants to be in charge of that as much as possible. How her in-chargeness manifests itself, in the latest novel from the author of “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier” and “The Children’s Crusade,” is that she wants her husband and caretaker Eliot to move out of their home so her two best friends can move in for what she jokes will be a “dying spa.” Should a person whose life feels like it’s ruled by doctors and medical procedures be able to grab some agency over herself? Of course. But there is fallout from the moves Claire makes and, as a result, she and Eliot have to make terrible choices, which they make very poorly. Eliot, for instance, begins spying on Claire and her friends, in an attempt to stay in the know about his wife’s health. And Claire, who’s so ill that she’s barely able to walk on her own, disappears at one point, without telling her family where she has gone. Packer specializes in domestic dramas that arise from tragic dilemmas for which there are no great solutions: In “Crusade,” parents seemingly realize they don’t love one of their children and in “Dive,” a woman grapples with what to do after her fiancé is paralyzed in an accident. Claire is going to die in “Some Bright Nowhere” — we all are, obviously, but, in this case, it’s foreshadowed in the book’s first sentence — and the questions that Packer grapples with all lead us to the same place: Hearts will be broken. Relationships are going to change. Huge emotional holes will open up. There aren’t going to be any happy endings. All of which is to say that “Some Bright Nowhere” is the polar opposite of a beach read, but that doesn’t mean it’s a total drag. Packer has a gift for depicting the undercurrents of emotion in moments when two people who have been together for decades, and have raised two complicated offspring who are now adults, continue to be surprised by each other. Eliot and Claire are frequently upset with each other in the unexpectedly funny “Some Bright Nowhere,” but both are good at getting through the upsets because of the sturdy core of their marriage. We also spend time with both of them when they’re not together, Eliot with a cooking club whose members are a kind of casually outraged sounding board and Claire with the friends who seem to know everything about each other (“My father drank gin,” Holly said. “Beaucoup gin. As I’ve discussed endlessly with both of you.”) It feels like Packer has a deep understanding of the complex emotions she portrays in “Some Bright Nowhere.” And like we’ve been given privileged access to a horrible situation we’d all like to keep confined to the pages of a book.
