A Compelling Book That Will Make You Assess Your Life: The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave
Know how, as soon as you finish watching The Sixth Sense, you watch the movie again, knowing the truth, and it all lines up? That’s how the prologue is in The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave.
Hat tip to The University of Texas at Austin, Apple TV, and Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop for introducing me to the work of Laura Dave.
How do those things connect? Well, my wife watched the adaptation of Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me on Apple TV and some of those episodes took place in Austin, Texas, and, specifically, the University of Texas football stadium. I stopped, watched those episodes, and then went on my way. Cut to a recent email newsletter from my nearby independent bookstore that featured Dave’s new novel and I thought why not give the new book a try.
The Premise
Nora Noone, architect, is surprised by her estranged half-brother, Sam, who secretly hired her to renovate a New York. What he really wants is simply to talk with her. She’s been avoiding him for the past few weeks, a period of time that corresponds with the weeks after their father’s untimely death. She wants nothing to do with the family company for which Sam works and she’s perfectly willing to continue not listening to Sam, but two things make reconsider.
One, their dad left the California cliffside property to Nora. This would be the same property on which sits a small cottage and from which Liam Noone fell. Two, Sam thinks their father’s death is suspicious. Not Spoiler Alert: in the prologue , we know he was pushed.
Now, the siblings forge an uneasy truce, but a truce implies that they’ve had some prior relationship. That’s not really the case. They barely have a relationship at all. Nevertheless, she agrees to fly out to California to just see what they find.
And they find just enough to keep digging. A stray fact here, an odd thing there, all of which seed doubt in their minds about the police report and, as they keep digging, about their dad. Did they know everything about him? The more they learn, the more they begin to wonder.
The Structure of the Writing
The way Dave wrote and organized her prose is excellent. Nora is the first-person narrator and everything she experiences is written in present tense. When there are flashback to Liam and his life, the prose shifts to third person, past tense. In this way, it is very easy to keep everything in line and, more importantly, compels you to keep reading.
Every flashback lands at precisely the right time (natch), fleshing out some detail about Liam’s life that we readers learn but that Nora and Sam have yet to uncover. In this way, you start wondering when they will learn the truth. Since Dave is an accomplished novelists, she strings out the story in delicious detail.
I listened to the audiobook (Julie Whelan was a great narrator) and I found myself utterly captivated by the story. It didn’t matter if I only had five minutes while washing the dishes, I’d plug in the earbuds and listen.
The Whole Truth: Nora’s and Yours
What I particularly enjoyed was how much Nora’s investigation into her dad’s death and life caused her to look inward at her own life. She’s engaged, but there are other people and elements who are all in the mix, and she is challenged to confront the reality of her life. It’s not always comfortable, but then again, I think each of us have realities we’d prefer not to see.
There’s a great line, late in the book, when Nora is closing in on the truth. She’s on a plane with a new young mother and her baby. The mom is taking a break from her husband, giving him time to confront his own life as a new dad. The young mom says, “My sister is pretty much the smartest person I know, and she told me to get on the plane. She said if you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.”
This line hit my reality and forced me to look around and assess things, especially as my birthday arrives next month (and then the new year soon after that). It’s always a good and positive thing to assess one’s life and make adjustments accordingly. I do it rather frequently, but Laura Dave’s succinct way of saying it crystalized it for me. I’m ready to see this quote on a poster somewhere.
What I’m also ready to do is read more books by Laura Dave. And watch that series on Apple TV. And dive into all the various places online where Dave has been making the rounds discussing this book.
The book is one of the best I’ve read this year, and I highly recommend it.