Reviewed By FIONA DE MERELL

Connecticut Muse

Spring 2008

 

 

iUniverse (212 pp)

Can past wrongs ever be put right? Can who we are now find true reconciliation with who we once were? Do we shape the world around us or does the world shape us?


Robert Crooke’s new novel, Sunrise, explores these questions of action and consequence in a story charged with pain, loss and universal truths. When the narrator, Stephen Dahl, returns to Montauk, Long Island after years of self-imposed exile in Paris, drawn home by the death of an old friend, he faces powerful memories and the realization that some things can never be quite put right.


As Stephen’s past and present are exposed, the story flips back and forth between his cautious reconnection with America post 9/11 and the defining events of a summer thirty years previously which ultimately led him to leave. Stephen takes us through a web of broken promises and unfulfilled hope as he struggles to face the places, people and tragic events of his youth.


The spider at the center of the web is the recently deceased Tom Westlake, who befriended Stephen at university in the late 1960s and drew him to the dissipated social scene of Long Island’s East End. Tom is controlling, manipulative and charming, capable of remarkably altruistic acts and gross self-absorption. As the young Stephen tries to fathom Tom’s motives, he is also busy loving and losing Alex Jordan and his own sense of self in a spiraling chaos of alcoholism and disillusionment. The horrors of Stephen’s alcoholism—and it is horrific in his resigned acceptance of his inability to stop drinking, his hangovers, his blackouts—and the ways in which it eventually separates him from every close relationship, are part of the key to his pain and that of those around him.


When the older, more sober Stephen revisits the places, people and emotions of his youth, he gradually confirms uneasy truths about himself and those around him. The revelations tumble with an elegant and terrible momentum and offer no simple resolution.


Robert Crooke’s clean, spare narrative proves that less can be more. He occasionally allows himself some purple prose but the impact and enormity of his characters’ actions and their wider parallels are all the more resonant for the uncluttered narrative that describes them. In Sunrise, Crooke offers not only a story about individuals but also a wider view on America’s sense of self. The narrative’s early reference to The Great Gatsby speaks for the then and now of society: “Fitzgerald had captured America in a moment’s irreconcilable balance between disappointment and hope.” This is what Sunrise does so well. The Montauk of Stephen’s experience offers an uncomfortable sense of elitism, community, flawed loyalty and an age about to be lost which serves as a microcosm of contemporary America as it searches for meaning and identity.


Sunrise shows what people are prepared to do for what they think they want and how they deal with the consequences. Like all stories that speak truly of the human condition, it stays with the reader long after the last page has been turned.