You can’t just write a novel about the family of a missing teenager
anymore; Oprah Winfrey and Lifetime Movies of the Week have dotted the
genre with thousands of clichés. It’s a landscape fraught with
peril, and a lazy or stupid writer could easily destroy a story by
charging blindly forward. Miriam Gershow’s The Local News, about
a teenager named Lydia Pasternak whose brother Danny disappears,
manages to avoid all these clichés and make it look easy.
Part of Lydia’s charm is that she’s not an angelic victim or a
heroic martyr: For the most part, she’s completely insufferable,
staggering blindly through her grief, making great strides toward
acceptance for a while and then getting drunk at a party and tearing
her world to pieces all over again. You’ve got to love someone who
manages to completely miss the point of an inspirational poster in her
psychiatrist’s office:
“A single poster hung in the office… it was a reproduction of a
Hockney-like painting, a front door of a house, opening onto a sudden,
serene ocean instead of a front lawn. I’m sure it was meant to be
soothing—an ocean of opportunities awaits you just outside your
front door—but it struck me more as a warning: Take one wrong
step and you’re sunk.”
Just because Lydia is selfish and wounded doesn’t mean she’s
completely unlikeable. She’s got a marvelously wry, dry sense of humor,
as when she takes on the job of tending all the letters from crazy
people that come to her family—”one promised that all the clues
to Danny’s whereabouts could be found in the movie Seven and
implored us to pay careful attention to GLUTTONY and VANITY and Kevin
SPACEY”—and occasionally mocks fellow high school students who
mangle efforts to console her. The Local News isn’t flawless:
Some bad metaphors pop up occasionally, including an especially wearing
comparison of a teenage party to chaos theory that wouldn’t have felt
fresh even a decade ago. But compared to the other recent novels in the
teen-abduction genre, especially the cloying melodrama of the recent
bestselling titan of the field, The Lovely Bones, it feels like
a revelation.