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Published on 5/7/08
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The prose of novelist Charlotte Bacon’s Split Estate is as unflinching and raw as the Wyoming landscape in which most of the book is set. The story opens shortly after Laura King—wife, mother of two teenagers and longtime depressive—jumps to her death from an Upper East Side apartment. Shocked and devastated, Arthur, her doting lawyer husband, decides to move his family back to his childhood home in the small town of Callendar, Wyoming—a place where he never quite fit in, being more comfortable with a book than astride a horse.
Bacon adeptly captures the less obvious and less pretty aspects of the King family’s grief, particularly Arthur’s complete loss of confidence—as if his wife’s decision to end her life has exposed him as inadequate. Lucy, Arthur’s salty, independent mother, might be grateful for the company that Arthur and the kids provide, but she also struggles to overcome her frustration with her only child’s nebbishy ways—as well as her own sense of culpability. “If she had loved him properly, with the lush abundance children required, he would not have married a woman just because she needed him so badly,” Bacon writes.
There are no easy resolutions here, just haunting meditations on character that are as compelling as they are austere. “She was too young for any of it,” Lucy thinks about her granddaughter Celia, the baby of the family. “Inevitably, she’d heal askew, like a rodeo cowboy’s skeleton, not a piece of it that hadn’t been shaken out of line.” As Bacon shows, personal tragedy, like the arid Wyoming landscape, is indifferent to our wants and needs.
—Adelle Waldman
