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Fiction
Title: The Walking Tour Author: Kathryn Davis Rating:  Must Read!
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Reviewed by: Julia Dahl |
 
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At the turn of this century, painter Carole Ridingham and her husband, entrepreneur Bobby Rose, embark on a walking tour of Wales. A fatal accident occurs, the details of which are elusive to both the reader and the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter, Susan Rose. A generation later, living alone in her family's Maine home, Susan attempts to construct a vision of the disaster and, more importantly, of her now-dead parents. Through journals, trial transcripts, and her motherÆs peculiarly candid letters, Susan begins to piece together the strange tragedy of her own life, as well as her parentsÆ doomed holiday. Susan's world, one rendered by Davis as if through a cobweb, is but a skeleton of our own. Our glimpses of her experience are minimal, as the bulk of the action takes place in Wales, but we find that her existenceùand as far as we can see, the existence of the entire universeùhas been fundamentally altered by the actions and passions of her parents. Susan struggles to find the truth of their relationship (the two are an exceptional, but troubled couple who communicate primarily through "suppression disguised as candor") and betrayals, not necessarily because of their absense or her own sense of loss, but because she is haunted by her curiously fading memories. She digs for "the moral fallout of [Bobby's] actions, the way they still poison every breath I take."
Davis' novel leads us through the lush Welsh countryside
with a cast of spectacularly rendered charactersùincluding
Bobby's business parter Coleman and his wife Ruth, whose
journals provide an intimate, but hopelessly perverted,
guide to the tour in Walesùeach more imperfect and fallible
than the next. Her delicate, magical prose is luminescent,
capturing with fantastic perfection the strange spell of
human behavior and folly.
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