Early Leaving

A mother goes to great lengths to defend her son in this slow-going, sentimental domestic tale with a racial spin. On the same night white student Early Smallwood delivers his high school's commencement address, he shoots and kills a young black man in Charlotte, N.C., in 1987. His mother, first-person narrator Kathryne Smallwood, a movie critic for a local magazine and wife to a successful lawyer, Peter, proceeds to recount in exhaustive detail Early's development from adored, overindulged only child and model pupil to accomplice to his delinquent childhood friend, Chip. Despite Kathryne's anguished self-searching, however, there's no convincing explanation for the valedictorian's transformation into a murderer save that Early was in the wrong place in bad company. Poet and novelist Goldman (The Slow Way Back) strives to engage with complex racial questions, but her protagonist's moral struggles are one-dimensional and dated as she struggles to reconcile her liberal self-image with her son's act. At novel's end, the Smallwoods remain bewildered by the changes around them, with Kathryne still wondering how she ended up""on the wrong side of a race issue."" All too convincing as a study in self-delusion, this is too deliberate and uninflected to satisfy as fiction.