The Family Man does not pretend to reveal new evidence about the murders or to propose a different theory of the case ... What The Family Man does illuminate to devastating effect is the way the case is emblematic of the direst aspects of contemporary American life: opioid addiction, litigiousness, brazen mendacity (and its bedfellow, gullibility), as well as guns ... At times, Lasdun lays on his meticulous research a little too thickly ... But when the book reaches a crescendo in its stunning final chapters, the elaborate detail becomes the foundation for his chilling distillation of Alex’s crimes ... A lesser writer might lay the blame on the all-purpose abstraction of evil, but The Family Man considers seemingly every possible avenue toward a more satisfactory explanation. Lasdun understands that evil and stupidity can be hard to tell apart.
This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lasdun wrote for The New Yorker, is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 murders of his wife and adult son ... Lasdun is a 'true crime' writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative, Lasdun is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery: the mystery of evil.
A thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written inquiry into how and why a person comes to commit such an appalling crime ... In this inquiry, Lasdun has the advantages of an outsider ... Ultimately, Lasdun finds a way to imagine how Alex committed those two murders, and the result, in the final chapter of The Family Man, is a masterful description of moral equivocation, the accumulation of little lies and diversions and excuses that people who do bad things.
While it does not reveal anything substantively new about the case, Lasdun’s prose is pure pleasure. His resistance to going full southern gothic is particularly admirable, although the hovering stink of rotting jelly fish caused by one of Murdaugh’s failed side hustles is too good to leave out ... Murdaugh’s retrial is likely to begin sometime next year and, chances are, Lasdun will be there to see it.
Readers titillated by the latest twist of this already highly publicised Southern gothic saga will be well served by the most recently published book about the case: British-born author James Lasdun’s perceptively written, psychologically minded account The Family Man ... Skilled as a novelist, poet and non-fiction chronicler, Lasdun himself reserves at least a sliver of reasonable doubt throughout his gripping — if sometimes too detailed — analysis.
Lasdun attempts to bring his rational, literary sensibility to a case in which reality repeatedly outstrips plausibility. The underlying tension of the book is shaped by his instinctive resistance to the idea that a seemingly loving father and husband could cold-bloodedly murder his nearest and dearest ... Ultimately, Lasdun’s book is less an attempt to resolve the Murdaugh case than to inhabit its contradictions. Denied the kind of access Truman Capote had for In Cold Blood (1966), he turns limitation into method, treating gaps in evidence as part of the story itself. The result is a portrait not only of a fallen legal dynasty, but of a mind struggling to impose rational order on a reality that stubbornly refuses to be pinned down. The case remains opaque, and Lasdun’s account is a bravura study of that opacity.
The author’s desperate quest is to understand what could possibly drive a man to kill his own family, and he pursues his mission with an obsessive, dogged, and sometimes speculative fullness ... Lasdun’s bewilderment and dissatisfaction with every element of the murders and the legal case seeps palpably to the page, drawing readers into an investigator’s obsession ... A tenacious effort to grapple with how a man becomes a monster.
