J. Robert Lennon is a connoisseur of calamity, qualms and paradox, all of which are on profuse display in his crafty, seductive eighth novel ... you begin to suspect that the Observer is a sort of self-satiric version of the author, a device to provide a running commentary on Lennon’s own ambivalent relationship to plot: his glee in creating it, his misgivings about the ordeals he has to put his characters through ... Broken River is a remarkable performance, a magic trick that makes you laugh at its audacity. Lennon has written a realistic novel, with vivid characters and flashes of humor and an evocative mood, that is also a playful, sophisticated meditation on storytelling itself: down-home metafiction.
Violence leaves a stain that soaks into the fibers of a civilization, a locale, even a family. Author J. Robert Lennon explores this stain’s significance in Broken River, a darkly cinematic novel that ponders both violence’s lasting implications and the past’s enduring consequences ... In fact, most of our time with The Observer feels more like a cinematic device than anything, with the character acting as audience and camera all in one. It’s as if Lennon wrote his novel in anticipation of its possible film adaptation (fingers crossed) ... The result is a stunning novel that doesn’t shy away from its well-rounded—if disparate—characters and their consequences. While a less-talented writer would wrap up the drama with a nice bow, Lennon chooses to meet violent responses with a poignant dose of reality.
Along the way, something interesting happens to the Observer: It becomes sentient, and as it perceives 'the gears of cause and effect locking together, increasing in rotational velocity,' it grows curious about the fates of the characters. The conceit adds a layer of awareness to a skillful if otherwise conventional crime story. Broken River is a novel that watches as its own plot unfolds, wondering at the way that 'everything is exquisitely interconnected, malevolent, and dangerous.'
Lennon’s true skill stems from his ability to combine a sharply focused character study, told from multiple perspectives, with a wider social realism that’s as unsettling as it is depressingly accurate ... What prevents Broken River from being classified as simply a horror or crime story are Lennon’s linguistic energy and dark humour; external incidents are significant, he suggests, but nowhere near as powerful as thought processes and the decisions we make every day ... It’s a rare book that manages to bend genres so successfully — that thrills and frightens while evoking such insight into human failings and the lure of the past.
Lennon raises questions of surveillance and the possibility of anonymity — questions that the spectral being lurking on the fringes of things helps to drive home. Lennon evokes the passage of time with precision: A long passage about the house's many years of emptiness turns detachment into something moving. He's equally good with the messier emotional materials: Eleanor's creative frustrations with her writing become quite tangible, as do Karl's failings as an artist, a partner and a parent. There are moments here of chilling violence, and of nuanced comedies of manners; the result is a heady novel that distills a host of anxieties into something offbeat and hard to shake.
We are in a backwoods place near a rust-belt kind of town; bad things have happened, and will happen. The house is haunted, but the ghost is the house itself. No reason is ever given why the place seems to be so magnetic for awfulness, and the novel is all the better for keeping the background in the back. Lennon’s prose has a languorous, lingering quality with shifts of perspective and tonal jolts that make you concentrate all the harder … There is some excellent satire about writing here, while the mordant and ironic edge to the book only makes its horrible points the darker: both Karl and Eleanor aren’t the creators they feel they could be … But there is another character in the book, the observer, a kind of wink at the omniscient narrator...As a narrative device this is audacious. It means that the novel can encompass past, present and future tenses, as well as levels of modality: ‘she could’ as well as ‘she will’.
The grandiosity of Lennon’s paranormal patina doesn’t elevate the predictability of the book’s domestic drama nor explain its violent end. The book pretty much tells us this ... An eminently readable but melodramatic story that dilutes its suspense with far-fetched metafiction.
What Lennon does here, and throughout the book with The Observer, is tighten the reader’s focus. It’s an elegant and, in some sense, passive way of going about directing and redirecting attention, but most of all it’s incredibly effective. On top of that, The Observer is a compelling character in their own right, growing and changing as any other character might ... Lennon wraps all of these characters up with one another, and for the most part it’s successful, but at times it can feel thin. The book is technically a psychological thriller, but to call it that seems reductive. If there was no murder or mystery, the intricacies of the family drama could sustain a novel on their own, and if the family dynamic were simpler, the force of the plot, as intricate and well-crafted as any book this year, would keep readers humming along ... The last 50 pages of Broken River are an absolute marvel. It’s a genuine thriller that’s genuinely literary. And, most importantly, genuinely good.
...[a] virtuosic eighth novel ... The metafictional musings of the Observer — a clever rehabilitation of the ancient Omniscient Author — seem to me superfluous. Readers of Broken River do not require prompting from an Observer in order to reflect upon the inscrutable lines of human intersection and collision. Or to admire the uncommon cunning behind this dark and brooding thriller.
Lennon alternates the scenes of his coalescing crime drama with asides involving the Observer, a silent, substanceless embodiment of the all-seeing omniscient narrative viewpoint that is powerless to prevent the snowballing misinterpretations and misunderstandings each character sees from his or her own perspective. The result is a finely tuned tragedy whose well-developed characters are all the more sympathetic for the inexorability of their fates.
