An account of a seemingly loving father's transformation into a 'family annihilator.' In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife and younger son at Moselle, their home in South Carolina's Lowcountry. Having covered the case for The New Yorker, novelist James Lasdun brings his long-standing interest in the darker drives of the human psyche to an investigation into the serial embezzlements, fatal boat crash, and other events leading up to the slaughter at Moselle.
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.
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.
