A Crime in the Neighborhood
by Suzanne Berne
Summary
In the spring of 1972, in a leafy suburb of Washington DC, a young boy is molested and murdered behind the shopping mall, and the neighbourhood's confidence in itself quietly breaks. Marsha, the novel's narrator, is ten that summer, laid up with a broken ankle, and she does what a clever, frightened, immobilised child does: she watches, and writes it all down in a notebook, and looks for someone to blame.
Her own house has already had its private catastrophe, because her father has left, and the two collapses, the family's and the neighbourhood's, run through the book as one weather system. The available suspect is Mr Green, the awkward bachelor next door, whose oddness is mostly shyness and whose bad luck is to live within range of a child compiling evidence. Marsha's notebook, her suspicions and her need for the world to make sense again converge on him, and the novel's real crime turns out to be the one the title has been quietly pointing at all along: what a community does to an unusual man when it needs an ending.
Berne sets the Watergate summer humming behind everything, the radio and the hearings and the grown ups lying on television, so that the suburb's small paranoia sits inside the country's large one.
Around three hundred pages, controlled and unshowy.
Best for readers who want a literary crime novel where the mystery is moral rather than procedural, told by a narrator looking back at the damage her younger self could do.
Historical Context & Significance
A Crime in the Neighborhood won the Orange Prize in 1999, a first novel beating a heavyweight shortlist, and its reviews fastened on exactly the effect Suzanne Berne had engineered: the New York Times admired how the book sets the different sized horrors side by side, a murdered child, a wrecked marriage, a lying president, without ever forcing the parallels.
Berne, an American who taught writing at Harvard and elsewhere, has written steadily since, A Perfect Arrangement and The Ghost at the Table among the novels, without another book landing quite this publicly. That is less a verdict than a fact about prizes: the Orange win put a quiet, exactly made domestic novel in front of a readership it would never otherwise have reached, which was precisely the founding argument for the prize.
The book has aged unusually well, because its subject, the manufacture of certainty about a stranger, has not dated by a single day since 1972.