Catherine Newman’s third novel for adults begins with big shocks in the small hours. Tormented by insomnia, Rachel — known as Rocky — is reading while her husband, Nick, sleeps next to her. In the beam of her headlamp, she notices a trail of red bumps on her arm — “a kind of dermatological shooting star.” Soon she’s out of bed and on her phone to find out what condition she might have. A cursory glance at the local news provides a second cause for alarm: a person has been killed in a collision between a car and a train.
This tragedy and Rocky’s health scare do more than contribute to a long night’s journey into day. From this point on, they will also profoundly affect the way Rocky lives and loves. “Wreck” follows her as she attempts to take stock of one disaster and another unfolding one while simultaneously navigating the obstacles and emotional turmoil of daily life. It makes for a novel that is filled with, and powered by, a winning blend of pathos and humor.
Rocky is a 50-something writer whose seemingly safe and comfortable world is her home in Western Massachusetts with her nearest and dearest. Husband Nick, a physical therapist, is caring and dependable, a voice of reason and a shoulder to cry on. Their daughter, Willa, works in a laboratory (“dissecting fruit fly brains for money”) while applying to neuroscience PhD programs. Rocky’s 92-year-old widowed father, Mort, has moved in. Her son, Jamie, has moved out, flying the nest to New York City to live with his “glossily gorgeous” wife Maya and forge a career in management consulting.
When Rocky learns that the victim in the railroad crossing wreck was a young man called Miles Zapf who was in Jamie’s class at high school, she is moved as a mother and trawls the news as it develops to ascertain whether the death was accidental or intentional. Gradually, her interest becomes obsessive: she looks again and again at Miles’s Facebook account and friends his mother (a woman “entirely made from heartbreak now”); she donates money toward funeral expenses and then turns up at the cemetery.
Rocky’s second concern prompts equally compulsive behavior. The strange rash on her arm spreads and “looks like it’s trying to bubble to the surface — the way pancakes get just before it’s time to flip them.” She visits a range of specialists — dermatologists, rheumatologists, phlebotomists, hepatologists — and undergoes biopsies. When doctors are stumped and test results are inconclusive, she increases her frantic google searches and disappears down ever deeper rabbit holes, sifting all manner of jargon and worst-case scenarios to get to the bottom of her medical mystery. Not knowing what it is proves agonizing — but so too is discovering that Jamie’s company was involved in the train crash that cut short the life of another mother’s son.
Readers familiar with Newman’s previous two novels will recall their meditations on mortality. The author’s acclaimed 2022 title, “We All Want Impossible Things,” revolved around a woman supporting her terminally ill best friend in her final days. “Sandwich” (2024), which introduced Rocky and her family, played out during a vacation on Cape Cod that was overshadowed by revelations of actual loss and fears of imminent loss — or as Newman termed it, “anticipatory grief.” Death rears its ugly head at the start of “Wreck” and at regular intervals throughout as Rocky mourns her mother and ponders how much time she has left with those she loves most.
All of which suggests a narrative shrouded in doom and gloom. But Newman tempers her bouts of darkness with frequent bursts of light in the form of Rocky’s dry or sparkling wit. There are her hyperbolic descriptions of her beleaguered body: “I’m a rotting corpse that’s been exhumed from a crypt after first being murdered with an industrial sander.” There are her droll remarks on how she and her husband are different: “His personality is very cross that bridge when you come to it. Mine is very apply to engineering school in case there’s a bridge that might need crossing but it hasn’t been designed yet.” Rocky makes amusing blunders, such as mistaking Willa’s friend Ruby, all glammed up for a night out, for a trick-or-treater in a “sexy-goth costume.” She also raises smiles by using “Godzilla” and “Incredible Hulk” as verbs, and induces snorts of laughter with angry responses she types (and then just as hastily deletes) to ignorant editors or racist commentators.
This steady strain of comedy is necessary as it animates passages that could otherwise have been dull. For “Wreck” is packed with quotidian clutter: Rocky mends jeans, washes dishes, writes in bed, and does a lot of cooking. Things threaten to become twee when she talks to her pets, and treacly when she gushes about her children. “I’m an undammable river of mother love,” she declares.
Fortunately, she is also a captivating protagonist whose wry observations and commentaries about matters of life and death keep us turning the pages. She entertains with her accounts of fruit-picking, pot-smoking, and polar-plunging, not to mention a trip to Boston for an MRI scan. She is appealingly volatile: happy and gutsy one minute, tearful or fretful the next. It is hard not to champion her when, like her boxer namesake, she rolls with the punches and suffers one or two particularly hard knocks. “My bottom line is being alive,” Rocky tells her dermatologist. She is vividly so throughout this bittersweet gem of a book.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
WRECK
By Catherine Newman
Harper, 224 pages, $26.99