[In the following review, Johnston praises the subject matter and execution of storyline in Before and After.]

Like a renegade comet, near-shattering violence careens into the lives of the ordinary people who populate the novels of Rosellen Brown, slamming them off course and in directions they never imagined. In Tender Mercies (1978), for example, a swimming accident destroys the vigor of a young woman who will be paralyzed for life, and Civil Wars (1984) portrays two children forced to cope with the death of their parents. “Many people have a kind of crack across their lives,” Brown explains—some tragedy that divides their existence into the before and the after. Before and After, Brown's fourth and latest novel, opens with the riveting discovery of a teenage girl beaten to death along a snowy stretch of New Hampshire road. This crisply written tale is not about what leads to the murder, though, or about the consequences for those close to the victim. Rather, it probes the aftermath of the family of the 17-year-old boy who killed her.

A brief glimpse at the Reiser family's “before” shows a contented foursome that breaks (or perhaps merely reverses) a few role stereotypes but otherwise falls within the mainstream of the American middle class: mother Carolyn, a pediatrician in private practice; sculptor, househusband, and father Ben; Jacob; and Judith, five years younger than her brother. But on that January day when Martha Taverner dies—“the seam between before and after,” in Ben's words—the luxury of un-self-conscious contentment vanishes forever.

Aside from the horror of Jacob's act, Carolyn and Ben must grapple with a surreal, vertigo-like version of every parent's inevitable realization that they no longer know their child—if they ever did. “The boy she'd held against her, had scooped up off the ground and balanced on her hip, had carried in his sleep, was gone away,” and in his place was a grown cat who “scented his fur with after-shave, deodorant, and mousse to disguise the smell his mother might claim as hers. A cat who did what he wanted to. A Tom.” Indeed, Brown doesn't allow anyone access to Jacob's thoughts or motives—to the truth, even, of the event—for Jacob's mind is immaterial to the work at hand. What matters here are the struggles of mother, father, and sister—victims robbed of their ordinariness and innocence, ostracized by the small New England community, and pitted against all they have left—each other—by their individual moral codes. The murder is, in Brown's characterization of her plot, a “bold and efficient way to force people to declare themselves morally to themselves and to each other.”

Ben's focus is narrow, tribal. When he finds damning evidence in Jacob's car, he gets rid of it, and continues to defy the system throughout the ordeal—never questioning his parental prerogative to protect his son, regardless of the nature of the crime, the effects on anyone else, or the larger rules of civilized society. Carolyn, on the other hand, looks beyond her immediate sphere; she considers the family of the dead girl and if not the salvation of Jacob's freedom, the salvation of his soul. For some time, though, she flounders between her conscience and her devotion to family bonds, angry and alienated from Ben but numbed to inaction lest she ruin whatever fragile structure still remains of the Reisers. Powerless, Judith despises her father's flagrant disregard for the truth and is terrified by her mother's ambivalence. Brown herself, however, makes no moral judgments of the characters. Even Ben, whose values seem at turns childish, anarchical, or simply repugnant, is redeemed in part by a rabbi who writes, “You should know your impulse is a natural one that is sanctified by thousands of years of spiritual decency.”

Ultimately the questions Which parent is doing the right thing? and even Which parent loves the child more? give way to Which parent is actually protecting the child? “Sometimes I wasn't even sure if what he did was the best thing for Jacob,” says wise Judith of her father. “I would have said, No lies for me, thank you, and let them punish me in return for feeling clean and honest.” She concludes, “I thought he loved Jacob too much and everyone else—everyone and Truth with a capital T—too little.”

Brown's idea to show the family of the criminal as inadvertent victims is perhaps as “bold” as the crime itself. In a culture where nurture is considered at least as influential in a child's development as nature—if not more so—we view the mother and father with suspicion, assuming they did Something that predisposed their offspring to evil. Isn't it a little disquieting to think that parents have no control over their children's outcome, for if blame can't be fixed, can we fix the problem? This is a brave foray on Brown's part—and a reasonably successful one. Carolyn, Judith, and even Ben arouse sympathy; these are normal, and, yes, blameless people, yet one can see how a Jacob—himself not an unsympathetic character—might (but wouldn't necessarily) form in their midst. Can parents ever know their child? No, says Brown, but if forced to take a hard look, they may get to know themselves far deeper than they ever dreamed.