If I Die Tonight

When critiquing certain types of art, it is important to consider what they are trying to accomplish. Genre fiction is a good example.Alison Gaylin's novel, If I Die Tonight, is not great literature, but it isn't trying to be. It is a murder mystery, the equivalent of snack food, and as such it is extremely tasty. It is a first-rate page turner.

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, the book concerns the hit and run death of a teenager in a small town in New York's Hudson River Valley. Everybody thinks that a loner kid, who is rumored to worship Satan, did it. But of course, over the course of the novel, secrets will be revealed. With books like these the last fifty pages or so are read in a rush.

Gaylin tells the story from multiple points of view (though with an omniscient narrator throughout). Wade, the kid, is viewed through the eyes of his mother, a single working woman, and his younger brother. We also get the perspective of a female cop. Pearl Maze (Gaylin perhaps adds too much when she gives Maze a backstory that includes accidentally shooting her mother). There is also the character of Amy Nathanson, whose car was involved in the incident. She's a former teen pop star, kind of like Tiffany.

If you pick these threads apart they don't stand well together, but Gaylin mixes a fine brew. I especially liked how she set this in the world of social media, sometimes quoting message board comments, Facebook posts, and the like. When Wade is accused, both his mother and his brother lose friends, as the tribalism of the community gets amplified.

The one area that I think Graylin fails is the resolution of the mystery--it's done by the confession of the perpetrator feeling guilty. There's no Sherlock Holmes here, not even a Jessica Fletcher. And the conclusion is a bit arbitrary--Graylin lays a few clues, but nothing that allows the reader themselves to figure it out. I finished the book in a rush, but wasn't wholly satisfied. The last chip in the bag wasn't that great.

The writing is solid, and doesn't often give in to her showing off. I did appreciate a few lines here and there that provide a social commentary, such as "Nobody was as happy as they looked on Facebook." Also, this eternal question: "The room was swimming, some other 1990s pop song—Smashing Pumpkins. Or was it The Smashing Pumpkins, she’d never been sure—blasting too loud over the speaker system, scrambling Pearl’s thoughts. Do they mean “smashing” as an adjective or a verb?"