The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, by Sandra Newmanreviewed by Chris McCreary
Sandra Newman. The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done. Harper-Collins, 2003. 389 pp. $24.95.
In a debut novel full of deft twists and unexpected intersections, Sandra Newman’s narrative spans a world’s worth of exotic locations and manages to weave together plotlines as diverse as germ warfare, professional blackjack, and New Age quackery. The novel’s depressed yet genial narrator, Chrysalis Moffat, already frail from her work on a deconstructive treatment of Dr. Faustus and further traumatized by her mother’s death, retreats beneath her bed, only to be coaxed out by her drug-addled, emotionally stunted brother Eddie. Together they open the Tibetan School of Miracles in their mother’s mansion with Eddie’s acquaintance Ralph, a charismatic former potter, designated as the venture’s sham guru. The farcical sequence of events that follows, relayed in Chrysalis’s wry, self-deprecating voice, is entertaining, but not nearly as engaging as the back story that gets filled in along the way. Switching to a terse, outline-driven report format at times, Chrysalis conveys bare-bones summaries of key events out of chronological sequence without robbing the reader of the pleasure of watching as the pieces finally fall into place. The back-story’s seemingly unrelated threads—Chrysalis’s search for answers about her scientist father and her own origins as a Peruvian orphan, Eddie’s quest for his long-lost first love Denise, Ralph’s past relationship with his gypsy/prostitute mother—dovetail in surprising ways as the three principal characters begin to implode within the confines of their thriving spiritual center. While Newman was a student of the late W. G. Sebald, the audacious sprawl of the plot brings to mind the pyrotechnics of Kurt Vonnegut or T. C. Boyle; that said, this is a highly original, readable novel that’s somehow deeply cynical and yet ultimately sympathetic to the fates of its damaged characters.