The why of things, by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop

       

This deeply affecting novel centers around a family trying to carry on with their lives after the eldest daughter dies.  And  not just any death, seventeen year old Sophie has chosen suicide, leaving her mother Joan; father, Anders; and younger sisters, Eve, 15, and Eloise, just 7 searching for why this has happened and how they will continue to live from that day forward.  Nearly a year after her death, they travel to their summer home on a quarry lake.  Unbelievably, just before their arrival, a young man has driven his pickup truck into the quarry and their first night there is colored by the search for the body.  Was he, too, a suicide?  Eve thinks not – and turns detective.  Joan is haunted by the idea that there is another mother nearby with the same questions and grief she has.  Water figures prominently in the book, although Sophie died by putting her car in the path of a train.  Anders is taking diving lessons, a Father’s day gift from Joan who is trying to keep him distracted from the tragedy.  Eve takes a summer job watering nursery plants and forms an unlikely bond with the taciturn owner, 60 year old Nestor.  The nearby sea and the quarry have hidden depths.  As it turns out, the question of “why” is never really answered.  Anders finds that life is “….a single energy that inhabits all living things, and energy that is both fleeting and eternal; we each are given it only for a time before it passes on to give life to something else.  What is comforting, at last, is the idea that while the energy might indeed pass on, it still exists somewhere, and it cannot be destroyed.”  304 pp.