Machine

This singular first novel from Steinberg (Spectacle) has the elements of crime fiction: a seaside setting with a dark underbelly, a family torn apart by infidelity, the tragic death of a beautiful young girl. But Steinberg makes the familiar story new, in part, by deconstructing her elements: “I’ll say the setting is the boathouse; the setting is a washroom; the setting: night and summer.” The book begins with an unnamed narrator, the rebellious young daughter of a successful businessman, standing near the water at the shore: “we all knew of the girl who drowned,” she relates, “she sank like a stone, they said; she was showing off that night, they said; the guys all said.” Though the girl’s death has little direct bearing on the narrator’s main story, it’s emblematic of the uneasy tone Steinberg establishes and becomes a dark motif for the events that follow. With the summer drawing to a close, the narrator recounts her wild vacation: the tenuous connection she had to the dead girl, desires she doesn’t understand, her disturbed brother’s increasingly reckless behavior, her father’s flagrant affair and insistence that she keep it a secret, her rage at the other woman, building finally to her family coming apart. What makes this tale so thrilling is Steinberg’s artistry with form; she fractures narrative into its fundamental parts. Steinberg writes prose with a poet’s sense of meter and line, and a velocity recalling the novels of Joan Didion. The result is a dizzying work that perfectly evokes the feeling of spinning out of control. (Aug.)