Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur tells a story from the perspective of an adult looking back at a decades-old pivotal event she sometimes misremembers. The event and its consequences shift their shape. Sometimes the story seems to be about killing someone with a golf ball. Sometimes it is about adult men who take sexual advantage of a teenage girl.
A few pages into the novel, readers learn that Mira Winston is the protagonist and narrator but sense that she is not the 18-year-old that she seems to be.
Growing up, Mira lived with her wealthy family in Tallmadge, a suburb of New York City. She was an expert golfer at a tony country club. Spencer, her brother, was a student at Princeton. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother a homemaker.
As the narrative unfolds, we learn that both parents drink heavily. For her part, Mira smokes marijuana and takes cocaine as well as a few other illicit drugs. But she adds water to the alcoholic beverages that her parents consume to help them maintain their health and control their drinking habit. This gives the narrator and the novel the flavor of Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye, as does Mira’s rebelliousness.
She is impetuous and has a volatile temper. Once, she used her father’s golf clubs to break her boyfriend’s car windows because he tried to go too far sexually with her; she accused him of trying to rape her. Another time, she crashed her mother’s car into a stop sign. Since Mira comes from a family with good connections, she is never charged with any crimes. This summer before college might be the exception.
The Amateur takes place during the summer after Mira has graduated from high school. The plot is a flashback as the adult Mira ponders the events of that summer, with its climactic moment occurring as she stands before a practice net with Kenny Foster on the other side.
Kenny is smart, doesn’t take drugs, has two younger sisters, and comes from a middle-class family. He works as a caddie to earn money for college. He also has a crush on Mira, which is an essential part of the action but one that eludes Mira.
As Mira swings at the golf ball and slams it into the net, the ball goes through the net and hits Kenny in the head, killing him almost instantly. This tragic accident happens in the book’s prologue. The next 300 or so pages provide context.
Mira feels responsible for Kenny’s death, but not because she purposely shot the golf ball through the frayed net to hit Kenny in the temple. (She didn’t.) Instead, she feels guilty because she is having a secret affair with Theo, a married man almost twice her age, and this affair will break up Theo’s marriage. As a teenager, she says, she was given to magical thinking and believed her affair somehow caused her to kill Kenny. She doesn’t realize Theo is a pedophile who is taking advantage of her.
She sees herself as Lolita, and Theo as Humbert Humbert. She also considers herself another Anna Karenina and thinks about throwing herself in front of an oncoming train. She attempts suicide by cutting her wrists in the bathtub, but as she explains, she is saved at the last minute by her boyfriend, Ethan, who is also older than she is and whom she eventually marries. Mira’s life, with its excessive use of alcohol and drugs, mirrors the movie Animal House, a title she drops several times.
Sitting at the novel’s center is a trial which is reminiscent of the trial in Alice in Wonderland, although neither Bohjalian nor his narrator make the connection. Mira exists in a chaotic, upside-down world resembling Alice’s Wonderland; Mira even calls her world “Mira Land.” Mira, like Alice, is charged with a crime that she says she did not commit. The evidence against her is practically nil. So who is at fault? And was it a crime or an accident?
The company that manufactured the net might be the cause of Kenny’s death because the net could have been defective. The country club could be to blame because it did not return the net to the manufacturer. The person in charge of the equipment might be at fault since he did not notice the frayed string. It might even be the person who removed the target sign from the net and who may have thereby damaged the strings.
The numerous literary devices in this story keep readers on their toes but are sometimes unnecessarily confusing. Adding to the confusion is Mira’s insistence that she is a novelist who has written 26 books and several plays — like Bohjalian.
Bohjalian’s penchant for literary tricks — seen in many of his other novels — is on full display. He blends Mira’s character with his own, creating a thought-provoking (but distracting) composite of the two. He tells a story within a story and creates an unreliable narrator and red herrings. He mixes past with present and fashions a Rashomon-like narrative, telling the story from two perspectives.
The novel exemplifies metafiction as Mira directly addresses the reader, and while engaging and ironic, Mira’s words detract from the story’s believability. Several times, she says she is trustworthy: “I’m not going to perform a little cause-and-effect sleight of hand in the last act or upend the narrative with obfuscation. Nope.” But she does.
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Mira claims this novel isn’t fiction. It’s a memoir of a pivotal incident that happened 26 years earlier, on Aug. 1, 1978. Mira is now a 44-year-old woman sharing her supposedly true story about accidentally (or not) killing someone at the Tallmadge Country Club. But who knows the truth?
And who is Mira? That’s the question propelling Bohjalian’s head-spinning novel as it plays “now you see it, now you don’t” with readers’ eyes and minds.
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher Program.