Riverhead
Review by Walter Cummins
It’s no surprise that Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a bestseller in the thriller & suspense and—not as obvious to me—literary fiction categories. Thousands of readers are eagerly turning its pages, I was among them, anxious to learn what is going to happen next. And those happenings are not limited to the two central police-involved mysteries but also to the outcomes for a range of characters with direct or ancillary involvements in the official cases. There’s also an escaped murderer lurking in the woods.
Moore has constructed a complex tangle of people, some sharing family connections, associated with the novel’s unknowns that stretch from 1950s to 1975. Each chapter heading includes a range of dates, with the timing of the present chapter highlighted in bold. The chapter titles specify a focus on a particular character. Something happens to that character in the shifting present, with subsequent chapters offering backstory that informs whatever happened.
Much of Moore’s skill allows her to juggle so many characters and so many time periods without getting lost in a confusing tangle of people and events. She manages to dramatize the unknowns of multiple characters simultaneously because their situations relate to each other and to one or both of the main mysteries.
Those mysteries involve the disappearance of the two children of the wealthy Peter and Alice Van Laar years apart, first the case of eight-year-old Peter IV, known as Bear, in 1961 and then the 1975 vanishing of his thirteen-year-old sister Barbara, born after he went missing. The search for her that dominates the 1975 present of the novel reopens the issues of what happened to Bear, including raising doubts about the man accused of his assumed murder, a body never found.
Much of the novel falls into the category of a police procedural, especially when young investigator Judyta Luptac joins the search for Barbara and also digs into the Bear past. But, simultaneously, what’s to be learned about other characters, who may or may not be related to what happened to Barbara and Bear, also sustains a narrative urgency. The novel offers mystery upon mystery, moving toward resolutions that may or may not connect to the Barbara or Bear solutions. Even the lack of such a connection helps answer questions that have accumulated along the way.
Inseparable from the novel’s mysteries is the social class hierarchy in this area of New York’s Adirondack Mountains, the wealthy land-owning Van Laars, with a bank in Albany, and their business associates—such as the McLellans, serving as the power elite. Others, like Victor Hewitt and his daughter T.J, manage the children’s summer Camp Edison created by the Van Laars or work on the camp. Then there are the locals dependent on the Van Laars for a living now that the local shirt factory has closed. The law enforcement team completes the cast.
It’s to Moore’s credit that she can create such a large range of people, many of them interestingly unique. Unfortunately, a number are clichés, especially the wealthy group around the Van Laars. Both Peter II and III are ruthless bullies of a familiar type. They care more about attracting clients for their bank than human feelings. Alice, Peter III’s wife, the mother of Bear and Barbara, is also familiar—a browbeaten alcoholic, cowed by her insignificance. It’s too easy and too obvious to make the rich the villains of the story. Fortunately, many of the other characters are much more complex and believable.
Another limitation of the novel is its prose, essentially flat writing that just delivers information without nuance or texture. For example, this is how Alice’s growing estrangement from Peter III is reported: ““But at some point, Peter’s reaction to her mistakes began to morph from amusement to annoyance. When she was eighteen, and learning how to host a dinner party, Peter had smiled as he gently corrected misspellings on the place cards, or vetoed calla lilies on the table; five years later, he scowled, and sometimes yelled.” Aside from a few general details such as “fine-looking and tall,” neither people nor places have a visual presence.
Still, despite these flaws, the inventiveness of the multiple stories and the effective structuring of past and present explain the novel’s sales success and appeal to readers, although it is more thriller than literary.
