CNN - Review: 'Reservation Road'

The postmortem torment comes courtesy of John Burnham Schwartz, whose novel "Reservation Road" filches the multiple-narrator structure that made Kurosawa's 1951 movie "Rashomon" a classic and renders it null and void.

"Rashomon" tells the story of a medieval crime four times -- from the differing viewpoints of a boastful highway robber, his wealthy victim, the victim's violated wife and a not entirely innocent bystander. The truth is out there, but it's malleable, shaped by individual perceptions and prejudices.

There are three narrators in "Reservation Road" and the tragedy that haunts them is decidedly modern -- a hit-and-run accident that kills 10-year-old Josh Learner on an unlit shortcut off a highway in Connecticut.

But the book falls short of its illustrious cinematic predecessor. Josh's parents, Ethan and Grace Learner, and his killer, a downwardly mobile attorney named Dwight Arno, each have their own, clearly labeled chapters, but they share a single uninflected tone of shock and denial. Ethan, who witnesses the accident, and Dwight, belatedly rushing his own young son, Sam, back to the custodial home of his ex-wife, remember the details of the split-second encounter on a dark road the same way, right down to the expression on the other man's face.

Strangely, neither Ethan's recollections nor the evidence found on Josh's body (dark blue paint from a Ford Taurus, model year 1986 through 1992) seem to help the police. Sergeant Ken Burke, who catches the case, apparently has the investigative skills of Inspector Clouseau. Interviewing Ethan at the scene, Burke shakes his head after the distraught father relays a clue he thinks may be important -- that he heard the driver shout a word like "Sham" or "Sam." "Important, sir?" Burke replies. "No, sir. Sorry." In addition, Burke is about as compassionate as a storm trooper. By October, he's telling Ethan that "officially the case has been moved to the back burner."

Maybe Burke simply hates the bourgeoisie. Ethan is a literature professor at a small local college; Grace is a beautiful, blonde garden designer. Josh was a violin prodigy, and his little sister, Emma, studies piano three times a week at music camp.

Grace's chapters are the only ones written in the third person, for no apparent reason aside from Schwartz's apparent inability to get inside a woman's head. In one passage, Grace responds to frumpy Ruth Wheldon, Dwight's ex-wife and Emma's piano teacher, in a surprisingly masculine manner, "noticing ... that where Ruth Wheldon's calves came out of the skirt they were shapely and young-looking and so were her ankles." Later, she feels as if "someone had cut out her heart with a spoon."

"Reservation Road" ends on an equally improbable note, with a confrontation that would be better suited to John Grisham or Stephen King. But it doesn't make much difference. This book about the most devastating kind of heartbreak is short on soul from the start.

Wendy Brandes supervises financial markets coverage for CNNfn. She lives in New York City.