Closer by Miriam Gershow
In her latest gripping novel, Closer, Miriam Gershow drops us into an Oregon high school in the Winter of 2016 on the day a young student, Livvy, has been found dead.
Clear your day for this one; you’ll be hooked from the first paragraph and unable to walk away until you know why this happened to Livvy and how all these characters‘ lives have been forever impacted.
To uncover the sequence of events leading to tragedy, we have to go back a year to when this all started.
A Community Thrust Into Upheaval
It was the winter of 2015, and students Baz and Lark were in the library for peer tutoring: Baz, the tutor, and Lark, the quiet girl with one friend — Livvy. To be fair, if you can only have one friend, Livvy is the one you want. She bursts onto the scene with all the confidence of someone much bigger and stronger than her 15-year-old frame. She’s feisty and quick-witted, ready to take on the world.
This is when it started: the racism aimed at Baz, who had the nerve to be one of only a few Black students in their school. The warmth he feels toward Livvy after she confidently defends him against the bullies soon grows into a relationship. Little did they know this would be the catalyst for the twists and turns their lives would take.
Their guidance counselor, Woody, attempts to help by becoming Livvy’s confidante, but ends up taking too much interest in her mother during a parent conference than is appropriate for a married man. If there was a mistake to be made, Woody made it.
Meanwhile, Baz’s mother, Stephanie, doesn’t care for Livvy straight away and believes her to be the reason for their family’s upheaval following the library incident. After all, if Livvy hadn’t had a savior complex — jumping in to defend the Black boy at school — maybe this could have remained a blip and not the focus of the entire student body.
Lark simply wants to avoid going home to her mother’s depression, but finds herself detached from Livvy, who would spend every moment with Baz if she could, leaving Lark isolated. If Livvy had never defended Baz, Lark wouldn’t have sought out a new friend and may have answered her phone the fateful night of Livvy’s death.
Entertaining and Devastating Read
I couldn’t stop the temptation to rewrite all their actions in my head, willing fictional characters to make different choices. If I can’t have a happy ending tied in a neat little bow, I want this: a book that leaves you reeling, wanting to talk to everyone you know about it.
There’s an undercurrent of tension running through this book. It felt like at any moment all their lives would implode, and my job was to keep turning the pages — devouring the story — until I learned what caused the tragic loss of a teenage girl.
As readers, we know what happened; we have a feeling the racial incident is the catalyst, but we have to get all the pieces to solve the puzzle. Saying I could not put this down is putting it mildly. I was addicted right from the prologue.
The way Miriam Gershaw weaves the individual stories of the characters together is brilliant. Friends becoming lovers, families in upheaval, futures not protected. Can one event set them all off on a shared journey, yet separately? If one thing had been different, would their lives have taken a less tragic course? We’ll never know, and I, for one, am grateful for it, because Closer was a wildly entertaining, if not devastating, ride.
About Miriam Gershow:
Miriam Gershow is the author of two novels and one short story collection. Her stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books, Alternating Currents and Fractured Lit, as well as many journals, including Pithead Chapel, Had and Variant Lit. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.
Miriam’s writing has been called “unusually credible and precise” and “deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, an Independent Publisher Book Award and a Pencraft Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Awards’ Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and has been awarded writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods and Wildacres.
She received her MFA from the University of Oregon and has since taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She has taught writing to first-graders, retirees and everyone in between. She is the organizer of 100 Notable Small Press Books, a curated list of the year’s recommended titles across genres from independent publishers. Miriam lives with her family in Eugene, OR, where she teaches writing at the University of Oregon.
