It's November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn't happy in his job but he fulfills the role. Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis champion with a key shot up her sleeve, is now a mother and homemaker. On this unseasonably warm Sunday, Kathleen decides not to join her family at church. Instead, she unearths her old bathing suit and descends into the swimming pool of their apartment complex in Newark, Delaware. And then she won't come out.
Jessica Anthony renders the pathos of older domestic dramas such as Revolutionary Road, but with an admirable economy of words and a creative omniscient narrator ... The narrator is not fooled, and neither is the reader. This technique elevates The Most from a simple marriage story to a portrait of an era, a minute event firmly entrenched in a larger world.
