Trigger warnings for references to child sexual abuse, murder, and suicidal ideation.
In Wolf at the Table, Adam Rapp spins a violent family saga based on elements of his mother’s life. Although this book contains more than its share of murders—including appearances from John Wayne Gacy—I found this book to be a fascinating exploration of how encounters with violence and evil can send people on such wildly different trajectories. Even better, the characters in this book aren’t simple fodder for inspiration. The characters are achingly fallible.
The Larkin family of Elmira, New York, appear to be ordinary from the outside, at least when we first meet them in 1951. We watch eldest daughter Myra have a stolen afternoon of teenage happiness with a cute boy in a nice car (who may or may not be Mickey Mantle). That night, however, a family on the same street as the Larkins is brutally murdered. Myra and her brother, Alec, witness the bodies being wheeled out of their neighbor’s house. Alec lashes out at his sister with his precocious cruelty when she asks him why he’s out of the house. We learn later that this is not the first time a member of the Larkin family is touched by unforgivable violence and that there’s a reason for Alec’s constant brutishness.
We then start to jump forward in time. Each time we land, we find Myra, Alec, and Myra’s son, Ronan, just before something bad happens. There are vicious family fights. There are brushes with Gacy. There’s schizophrenia and abandonment. There is death. From that day in 1951 in Elmira, the Larkins pinball around and into each other. Myra tries to reach out to her increasingly lost brother while wrestling with her husband’s mental illness and her increasingly poor health. Alec falls further and further into darkness, periodically surfacing to inflict hurt on the world that hurt him. Ronan’s fortunes rise and fall with the illness he inherited from his father.
Wolf at the Table is a bleak book but I couldn’t put it down. I was engrossed by the ways in which the characters intersected with and diverged from each other. I deeply appreciated its grit. Nothing comes easily in this book, creating an atmosphere of unflinching honesty. But this book isn’t all pain and sorrow. There are moments of stunning grace: unconditional parental love, a good death, revelation, justice. These moments make the metaphorical storm clouds disperse for a little while to give us a glimpse of what life could be if the characters renounce the temptation to hurt others the way they’ve been hurt, if they can find and accept help instead of causing destruction, and if they can transform their wounds into strength. This is an amazing book.