But as teller of this tale, Loesch withholds information, from himself and the reader. He’s more than an unreliable narrator. He’s self-deluded, in denial, shut off to his feelings, and not particularly sympathetic. The reader learns to not entirely trust Loesch, and in this mostly gripping novel this suspicion creates currents of tension and frustration.
Through roughly the first third of the book, about all he admits to is a career in “infrastructure and information.’’ In detail, we hear of his efforts at home improvement and his unexplained forays into the woods. This is a task-oriented, tightly wound guy. His internal voice is full of archaic, emotionally drained turns of phrase such as “in my temporary employ.’’ After repeated encounters with an albino deer on his property, he notes, “I am not the kind of person who subscribes to half-baked, magical ideas. . . . I have been trained to do what I am told, and to report the facts as I find them.’’
In literature, this “I’’ viewfinder is an accepted convention; it’s fiction’s best-guess construct that passes for the protagonist’s mind-soul-commentary running behind the voiced self. But this limited window occasionally gets Lennon into trouble. Loesch may claim he is not a self-reflective person, but our uptight hero is insightful, when he chooses to be so. As the story gets underway, and as we intuit more about Loesch’s back story (estranged relationship with sister, unresolved demise of parents, and worse), one begins to feel the author willfully clouding the narrator’s mind when it serves to infuse the plot with “Silence of the Lambs’’-style psycho-tension.
