mfontan's Full Review: Ann Packer - The Dive from Clausen's Pier
When does young love stale? Where do you find the courage to step away from someone who has had your heart so long, you’re not sure you can exist independently? Such questions haunt Carrie Bell, the 23-year-old narrator of Ann Packer’s insightful debut novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, as she and her fiance, Mike, drive toward Clausen’s Pier for a Memorial Day celebration.
Despite the sunshine, the cool Madison, Wisconsin, breeze, the aged memories that float through Carrie’s mind as easily as a dandelion seed on the wind, her thoughts buzz with only one reality: “My mind was on the long untangling I felt was coming our way.”
Carrie’s unhappiness, her heavy inner turmoil, soak these opening pages, and the reader, Carrie’s friends, and yes, even Mike, make note of her empty, sad eyes.
“Watching him with his friends, I longed to feel again what I no longer felt: that he was just what I wanted.”
But four pages later, Mike-- in a foolish attempt to make his girl smile, the girl he’d loved since he was 14-- dives from the pier and ends up paralyzed from the waist down. Even as Carrie watches Mike suffer, she can’t help realizing: “It was only myself who was wrong, who had changed somehow, who had become wrong-- for him. For us.”
Feeling suffocating, trapped and utterly confused about the direction of her life, Carrie abandons her obligations in Madison and runs to New York City, where she finds a new kind of love with an older man, and starts discovering pieces of herself she never thought existed. Ultimately, though, she realizes the pull of family, understands her loves on a different level and begins finding a peace she had not experienced in a very long time.
As readers will see, the story itself is captivating. Packer easily climbs into Carrie’s skin, unearthing all the muddled emotions and bewildering thoughts plaguing most 20somethings in that pocket between college and ‘real’ life. Her writing is so graceful, easily weaving between stream-of-consciousness and heated dialogue-- from tense discussions with Mike’s best friend, Rooster, to comfortable conversations with Mike and Kilroy.
Most importantly, however, Packer writes truthfully. Everything Carries feels, all her desires and frustrations, reek with unabashed honesty. And while you sometimes want to pity Carrie, other times scream at her as Mike’s mother so longs to do, you can’t help but like her as you delve deeper and deeper inside her head. It’s no wonder Entertainment Weekly rated The Dive from Clausen’s Pier one of 2002’s best works of fiction, as every word is a treasure. I can’t wait to see what Packer will present us with next. (A)
How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann...More at HotBookSale
Twenty-three-year-old Carrie Bell feels suffocated and wants to leave her life in Wisconsin, but when her fiance is paralyzed in a diving accident, sh...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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