Point of View

Chapter to chapter, the point of view changes. Although chapters told from the perspective of Claire and Clive dominate the novel, in different chapters the reader hears from other characters, for instance the actor who found Alison’s body, Alison’s high school English teacher, Clive’s boyhood crush and the mother of her son, Alison’s boyfriend from college, the actor asked to play Alison in a miniseries, even Alison herself in the form of italicized passages from her audio diary. In addition, through the agency of Claire’s copious archives culled from more than twenty years of Internet searches, the novel offers fragments from newspaper articles, magazine interviews, even the autopsy report. Any single perspective, of course, could sustain an entire novel. Rather than fragment the novel, this splintered point of view creates an entirely different feel. Like the polished stones in a...