Alan Rossi’s debut novel takes place in the days following a tragic road accident. Nicholas and April are travelling home following a party on campus. In a moment of inattention, their car skids off the road and flips over. April is killed instantly. Nicholas dies later in hospital. As readers, as spectators, we know this from the outset. In one sense, the central drama of the novel takes place before the novel begins. In another, quite different sense, that drama is just beginning.
Nicholas and April leave behind a four-year-old son, Jack. In the hours and days following the accident, members of their family attempt to come to a decision over who of them is best placed to care for him in his life without his parents. Nicholas’s brother Nathaniel and his wife Stefanie are convinced that not only are they best suited to be parents, they are also Jack’s rightful guardians as appointed by Nicholas and April. Nicholas and Nathaniel’s father David has other ideas – with their busy working lives, can Nathaniel and Stefanie really offer Jack the stability he needs? April’s mother Tammy, partially estranged from the family, feels she is being pushed out. She believes she shares an instinctive bond with Jack, the kind of bond that no amount of money or possessions can come close to replacing.
As the six people in this drama draw closer geographically, so the cracks and contradictions in their intertwined relationships begin to appear. In the end it is left to Nicholas – trapped and dying in the wreckage of his car – to imagine into being a future he himself will not live to see.
This novel is a difficult read in all the right senses: emotionally devastating, morally ambiguous, with questions left unanswered and no ideal solutions on offer. Nicholas’s section in particular is devastating, and given the psychological pressures of our current circumstances I would advise sensitive readers to approach with care. But I would, unequivocally, advise them to approach, for Mountain Road, Late at Night is an extraordinary achievement, and whilst it is a difficult book to come to terms with it is absolutely not a difficult book to read. Rossi’s narrative burns off the page – I kept thinking of it as a stream of lights, of cat’s eyes, illuminating each new stretch of the road it travels, offering partial but transformative glimpses of what is to come.
There are times you read a book and think: this writer loves and reveres the written word. This was one of those times for me. The imagery, the thought process, the densely articulated emotion, the lack of sentimentality, the heartfelt compassion and depth of empathy – these are the effects and attributes of Rossi’s writing and you will find this novel, slim though it is, circumscribed though it is in terms of its canvas and cast of characters, impossible to forget.
If you liked John Wells’s movie August: Osage County (brilliantly adapted for the screen from his own stage play by Tracy Letts) then you will love Mountain Road, Late at Night.
There is something curiously timely about this book. Watching its action unfold is somewhat akin to watching April and Nicholas’s accident unfold in slow motion: everything is happening now, and everything that happens in the days afterwards is also happening even as the car begins its fatal slide across the mountain highway. We cannot alter what is happening, but we can live in these moments, we can feel close to the protagonists – all of them, equally (though I loved Tammy best!) – and we can examine our thoughts, our feelings, our actions as if we, too, were a part of this drama.
We are a part of this drama. What we do matters. What we say matters. How we feel matters.
The current situation is of an extreme magnitude. The word everyone keeps using is unprecedented, a word too often put in play maybe, only in this case it’s true. At least for us, at least for now. I normally love this time of year – with the evenings getting longer and the light increasing, it is my favourite time of year, more beloved even than summer, because all the flowers are opening and summer is still to come. Seeing our little town so closed and so quiet at a time when it would normally be opening itself to the increasing sunshine and a growing number of visitors is heartbreaking. I worry especially for all the small traders and hospitality businesses and freelance individuals who depend on these visitors, as our town depends on them, on being visible, on being beloved. Yet at the same time there is a sense of relief, that this shutdown happened before the season got underway, increasing the risk to the town and to resident islanders.
It will take everyone a long time – years maybe – to process and recover from what has happened, what is still happening. We do not properly have the language to process it, not yet – hence the over-reliance on preconceived images of dystopia, which are inadequate and more especially mostly inaccurate. We must and will in time develop that language, and in constructing a narrative I hope also that we will think differently about what can be achieved – what we can achieve – if the political will is there. We have seen measures enacted over the past weeks and days that we would never have imagined possible. What if the same measure of political will were brought to bear in combating climate change? In helping marginalised communities? In protecting threatened environments and ecosystems?
There is a measure of disjuncture, in the present time, in reading books that were written and conceived before the present time. I am sure everyone reading this will have found themselves reading a novel or watching a TV drama and thinking: ‘ooh look, people in a pub!’ or something of that kind. People in a pub – like an image from deep time. A disjunctive and somehow shocking experience.
We might find it useful and even helpful to fully inhabit those moments of inner drama, to try and understand them, to discover what they mean for our ability to imagine.
Knowing that we will – on an individual as well as a societal level – be changed by this is frightening, estranging, humbling and utterly new.
Read what feels right for you. In a move that might seem counterintuitive, I found myself reaching for Countdown City, the second novel in Ben H. Winters’s Last Policeman series. Reading about a murder investigation taking place against the background of an impending asteroid strike might not seem like the happiest of impulses right now, yet the protagonist’s calm, compassionate, organised and professional attitude to coping with disaster has a curiously calming effect. I loved the obsessive attention to detail in the first volume – I love this kind of forensic writing – and it has been hugely enjoyable and energising to encounter it again.
Work is good, being in touch with friends is good. As through those dark and uncertain months that are the Scottish winter, running early in the morning is good. When I’m running, everything feels normal. When I’m reading, everything feels new.
I’d like to particularly thank all those writing and creating content – getting new stuff to read and watch and think about is even more important now than it is usually. A particular shout-out to Influx Press, who are planning to take some of their author events online as the lockdown continues, and to booktubers and podcasters Caroline, Eric, Simon, Mercedes, Jen, Sophie, Lauren, April, Rachel and Claire among many others – your passion for what you read and your resilience in continuing to make videos to keep us all going through this current crisis is a priceless gift.
For everyone reading this blog, please keep safe and well.
You can find a short and beautifully illustrated essay by Alan Rossi about the inspiration he finds in the Blue Ridge Mountains here.