Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel, The Amateur, takes place during the late 1980s in the upscale suburb of Tallmadge — a fictional town based, one assumes, on places like Rye or Scarsdale. It is territory that Bohjalian knows well, having grown up during that same period in Bronxville, another bucolic Westchester suburb. Tallmadge is a privileged, isolated community where everything always appears to function according to plan — at least on the surface.
Mira Winston, the novel’s protagonist, is an 18-year-old high school senior and golf prodigy, set to play varsity golf at Yale in the fall. However, one day, she hits a shot at the country club that incongruously travels through a hole in the practice netting and strikes her young classmate Kenny Foster in the temple. Foster, a promising student whose middle-class family has recently moved to Tallmadge from Florida, is an outsider to the recondite social world around him. He instantly falls to the ground, dead.
The novel’s protagonist is known for being impetuous and doing things like taking a golf club to a classmate’s windshield or crashing her car in rather remarkable ways. The problem with Mira Winston however, may be more than just be hormonal or a case of occasional mean girl attitude — as with Tallmadge itself, underneath the surface of Mira’s psyche far darker secrets may lurk. We soon find out that someone had cut out a target that originally hung from the practice net, in the process weakening the netting. Unfortunately for Mira, removing the target from the net was something she herself had vociferously advocated the day before. She therefore appears guilty not only to Kenny’s parents but also to state prosecutors, who have the netting manufacturer and the golf club in their crosshairs as well.
Part of Bohjalian’s talent in The Amateur lies in his use of a surprising first-person narrator, who recounts the tale from some 30 years in the future: commenting both on the characters and on the very different attitudes toward social issues that prevailed at the time. The result is almost cinematic at times, as when a film roll stops and one of the movie’s characters steps out of the frame to speak directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. To make things worse for Mira, she is soon spotted by Mr. Foster in a hotel lobby with one of her classmates’ fathers, with whom she has been having an affair since the age of 15 (or one could say she has been groomed). In the mixed-up teen psychological world that she inhabits — one she has dubbed “Mira Land” — she sees a causal relationship between sleeping with her friend’s father and Kenny’s death, a kind of retribution or punishment. She considers herself a murderer, even though the death was purely accidental. Why else, she reasons, would something so terrible occur?
For those who have not yet read his work, Bohjalian is a remarkable novelist who produces a new volume every 12 or 18 months, a pace comparable to that of Stephen King in the United States or Amélie Nothomb in France. Golf and Westchester County are not two subjects that usually interest me much, but Bohjalian’s insightful exploration of his characters’ psychology, his takedown of suburban 1980s culture, and his fluid prose made one race through the pages of The Amateur. And when the narrator addresses the reader like a co-conspirator, it creates a sense of intimacy and suspense. The mark of a Bohjalian novel is that often an ingenious and wholly surprising plot twist that upends the reader’s expectations. This is the case, for example, in his brilliant riff of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in his 2007 novel The Double Bind (2007) where every expectation the reader has is ingeniously foiled. Other notable Bohjalian novels include The Sandcastle Girls (2012), a sweeping work that retells the story of the Armenian Genocide through the intertwined stories of an American living in Syria in 1915 and an Armenian family trapped in the mass killings. Also noteworthy is his 2007 novel Midwives, which was adapted into a television movie starring Sissy Spacek. This last novel which deals with the terrible aftermath of an emergency childbirth, became a No. 1 national bestseller. At the relatively young age of 64, Bohjalian only seems only to be gaining momentum. A popular figure on the book-signing circuit, he often presents his work at Armenian venues as well, and supports diverse Armenian institutions and causes.
The Amateur moves at a leisurely pace at first but gathers steam with each new revelation about Tallmadge and the behavior of its supposedly model citizens. While it feels like less of a thriller than some of previous novels, in the end it doesn’t disappoint. The author also cleverly uses the plot to look back at a time not so long ago when society was characterized by a different set of power dynamics. At one point, the narrator addresses the reader with a coy reminder: “Remember this was before MeToo.”
