Daddy issues

AFTER HER

By Joyce Maynard

308 pages

Available at National Book Store

MANILA, Philippines - Joyce Maynard has written seven novels, among them To Die For (made into an amusingly snarky movie with Nicole Kidman), and After Her follows another killer in the community, this time into the dense pines and shadows of a California mountainside forest.

Of course, the bigger shadow is cast by Maynard’s previous memoir, At Home in the World, in which she detailed her live-in relationship with iconic author J.D. Salinger, who courted her after reading a New York Times Magazine article she wrote about being a teen in the ‘70s.

Maynard was 18 and Salinger was 53 when they began living together.

Writing At Home in the World must have trained Maynard in the art of crafting sympathetic descriptions of older men and creepier characters who behave at times like serial killers.

Though Maynard couldn’t figure out, in her memoir, why Salinger, who courted her through long personal letters and then unceremoniously dumped her 10 months later with the immortally damning line “You… love… the world! ”, it’s a mystery that has probably sharpened her detective skills ever since.

After Her focuses on two sisters in the summer of 1979, Rachel and her younger sister Patty, who concoct adventures in the surrounding mountain forests — until a series of brutal murders leads police to suspect a serial killer is loose in Northern California, whom they dub the “Sunset Strangler.” Suddenly, Rachel and Patty are prohibited from occupying the Eden of their backyard woods and start to grow up — and growing up is hard to do, especially when your dad (separated from your mom) is the chief detective investigating the murders and all you ever hear on the radio is bits and pieces of The Knack’s My Sharona (Ooh my little pretty one, pretty one…).

Rachel’s mom is depicted as somewhat unsympathetic — she won’t pay for cable TV, so her daughters have to sneak around at night, watching other people’s televisions through their windows, making up storylines to go along with the mute images — and she’s also somewhat reclusive and bitter, having been left by the charismatic Detective Tony Toricelli, who is said to “love women,” so much so that he has at least one on the side.

Maynard’s mystery proceeds apace, with bodies of young female hikers piling up and no clues to the killer’s identity. Rachel (who is nicknamed “Farrah” by her dad) struggles with a first menstrual cycle that doesn’t come until the most inconvenient time; Patty is the hero-worshipping younger sister who makes her mark shooting basketballs for her junior high team. There are plenty of topical references — The Rockford Files, Jaws, Dolly Parton, Peter Frampton — that place us squarely in that nostalgia fest of the ‘70s. On top of this, Maynard feels the need to add that Rachel is a bit psychic: she sees glimpses of the killer in her mind, but not enough to convince her dad that she’s on his trail. Just enough to drive her a little crazy. (Shades of Carrie.)

At first, Rachel’s dad is a celebrity — he’s on the TV news every night, reporting on the investigation, and all her friends remark on how handsome he is. This elevates Rachel’s social status, until the murders remain unsolved too long, more killings take place throughout the summer, and folks begin to grumble that Detective Toricelli doesn’t have a clue.

What anchors After Her through the first two-thirds of the book is the exploration of Rachel’s unwavering attachment to her father. She tells us so often that he’s “the most handsome” man in town and that everyone knows how “he just loves women,” that you begin to suspect that Maynard is going to pull a fast one and make him the killer. But that would be cheesy as hell. In fact, Maynard is more interested in how young people’s adolescent attachments — in this case, to their fathers — become redefined and reexamined over time. Rachel never condemns her dad, but comes to understand him in a broader sense, as the investigation unfolds. You could say she has daddy issues to work out.

So must have Maynard. Living with a legendary author whose work touched the hearts and souls of countless young readers, Maynard must have felt immensely constrained to realize that this man could only offer her sliver of admittance into his inner world. Salinger emerges in her memoir as a more richly detailed presence than a dozen carved out of fiction, and that shadow must have felt very real to her. When Maynard was cast out of Salinger’s Eden, she embarked on a career as a single-mom columnist for a newspaper, then turned to fiction. To Die For was an early best-seller.

As Madonna has explained to us, “life is a mystery,” so it’s no surprise that Maynard has embraced the mystery novel as her stock in trade. Where else can you raise certain questions — such as why do fathers leave? why are men like that? why are women like that? — but in a literary genre in which some answers can actually be found?

Detective Toricelli turns out to be a well-crafted literary creation, not just a two-dimensional daddy archetype, but the last third of the book takes up the loose threads of the “Sunset Strangler” case in such an abrupt, non-convincing way that you’d think it was the last 15 minutes of The Rockford Files, after the car chase scene, where private eye Jim Rockford is about to catch the real killer and turn him over to local authorities. But then again for Maynard, having a killer — even a literary one confined to her pages — continue to lurk around, unexposed, long after the book is closed, must have felt a little too creepy and confining.