Now comes the weird upon me: Joseph Olshan's In Clara's Hands, his seventh novel, and one of those rare and unfortunate books which finds itself anticipating tragedy.
The book's inciting incident - and also its great mystery, the scene of its several twists and its final resolution - is an American jumbo-jet shot down by terrorists. Alas.
It is, of course, always difficult for a writer to make reality credible - and American reality often seems more incredible than most. Olshan's example here seems to suggest that what is required is a kaleidoscoping of personal tragedies and huge disasters - just the usual. Perhaps the world has always been a mess, and the human lot quite horrid.
The personal tragedies are, as ever, numerous. Olshan may write sweet and light, but his heart is heavy. Right from his much- acclaimed dΘbut, Clara's Heart, and through Nightswimmers and on to his most recent, Vanitas, Olshan has been loading up his books with more than their fair share of Weltschmerz and Ichschmerz. There may be more suicides in his novels than there are in Sweden.
In Clara's Hands is another great cargo of Wertherisms and the proverbial sweet white wine. Will Kaplan - familiar to readers from Nightswimmer - is booked on to the doomed flight with his friend, Marie Claire Arcenaux. Will changes his plans at the last minute, however, and doesn't board the plane. Marie Claire may - or may not - have done.
The plot thus neatly set and wound up, Will sets off in search of Marie Claire. The trail leads him back to his former lover, Peter, who happens to be Marie Claire's son. Peter is a "successful landscape architect who had a lot of rich movie people for clients". Will, remember, is a dealer in rare maps, a broad-shouldered former lifeguard ("a job he'd taken to help fund his graduate studies in art history") and an habituΘ of various psychiatric institutions.
During the course of the book, Will also finds himself reunited with the irrepressible Clara Mayfield, another Olshan stalwart. The elderly black Clara looked after Will as a child, and they remain close. If anything, in fact, too close, with Olshan pulling the strings of their relationship unbearably tight and a little too neat: "She was a mother estranged from her children, and I was a child estranged from my parents."
Clara's own son committed suicide, and she and Will spend much of their time together reminiscing about Will's older brother, Danny, who - inevitably, one may feel - died in a freak skiing accident that may have been suicide. Also, Peter's sister - or half-sister - is dying of cancer.
This rather grim narrative is told from various viewpoints and perspectives, with Clara and Marie Claire undoubtedly getting the best of the story to themselves, Clara in her lively reported patois, and Marie in sudden dam-bursts of stream-of-consciousness.
Olshan's is a melodramatic mode of storytelling, unthreatened by his occasionally stilted dialogue and a series of extraordinary coincidences.
The book ends with the obligatory twist and concludes in mournful celebration of all the virtues you'd expect it to: love, obviously, but also the odd and insignificant pleasures of small-town American life, where Olshan seems to see some hope of salvation. Peter arrives in the town of Abbeville, for example, when it is preparing for its annual omelette festival, "which attracted contestants from all over the world competing in several categories including 'largest omelette' ". Weird, then, and wonderful.
Ian Sansom is an author and critic