Changing the ending

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the detective story, we have known that a good murder mystery can also be good literature. Even so we tend to forget, isolating mysteries into their own genre and their own sections of book stores and libraries. Once in a while someone like Carolyn Parkhurst comes along to remind us of what we already knew.

Her 2010 novel The Nobodies Album is a low-key murder mystery with literary aspirations (just as her previous novel The Dogs of Babel was a sci-fi/horror story with literary aspirations). The narrator and heroine is Octavia Frost, a successful novelist who is rethinking her career just as she is rethinking her life. The new book she is about to deliver to her publisher is actually a collection of revised endings to all of her previous books. Couldn't they have happier endings?

Her own life, for all her literary success, has been less than happy. Her husband and daughter died accidental deaths some years before, and for the past four four years she had been estranged from her son, Milo, now one of the country's most popular rock stars. He had read something in one of her novels that, for good reason, he took very personally.

It takes a murder to bring mother and son back together. Milo has been arrested for killing his girlfriend. He was intoxicated and remembers little about that night, but he is discovered with her blood all over him and no other person in the house.

Octavia doesn't see herself as an amateur sleuth and doesn't act like one. She is just a mother who doesn't believe her own son could do such a thing and so looks for any other possible explanation for what happened that night. Can this story, too, have a different ending than the one that seems so obvious?

This idea of changing endings replays again and again throughout the novel, including when an aging rock star talks about rerecording some of his biggest hits. Can you go back and change what has already taken place, or must an ending be changed before the ends comes?

In the end, The Nobodies Album succeeds better as a murder mystery than as a literary work, yet both attempts are hindered by Parkhurst's inclusion of the last chapters of Octavia Frost's novels as well as the proposed revisions. Some of these are interesting enough, but they all interrupt her story more than they contribute to it.