All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

 

I almost stopped reading his novel before finishing the prologue, a drippingly sentimental and pretentious thing in first person plural talking about a former farmhouse. I didn't, and I ended up in a novel that says it's about a murder and you might think that means it's about solving the murder but no, it's about how the murder--and a couple-three others--came to happen, the sad mental state of the broken humanoid doing them, how he's emotionally cowed his wife and his lover, how he's conned and grifted his way into a tenure-track position (the novel is set in 1978-1979, when I guess just about anyone could find a tenure-track position, as opposed to now when all the gigs are as adjuncts) in some grubby little college. The novel has all the tics of a 2010s novel written with "literary" aspirations, the one most people will notice is the absence of quotation marks around dialogue; the college professor having the affair thing is, of course, such a cliche in a kind of "literary" fiction that all I could really do is laugh. The best thing about this novel is the cover; I should have stopped with the prologue.