"Carthage" by Joyce Carol Oates (2014)

Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel (for a few months, at least). Carthage opens with a missing persons investigation. Twenty-year-old Cressida Mayfield has gone missing, last seen uncharacteristically at a country bar in the presence of her older sister Juliet's former fiancé, Brett Kincaid, a severely injured Iraq war veteran. Brett suffers from a variety of physical and mental ailments related to his time in Iraq. He carries around a heavy load of guilt for civilian atrocities he witnessed at the hands of fellow platoon members. The night of Cressida's disappearance, Brett had been drinking heavily with friends on top of his cocktail of meds and cannot remember what happened to the girl. However, in spite of the absence of a body and extremely inconclusive evidence against him, he eventually confesses to murdering Cressida and dumping her body in a nature preserve and is sentenced to prison. He apparently feels this is just punishment for past "crimes" even if he is not actually responsible for Cressida's disappearance. The shift to section two of the novel is disconcerting as the upstate New York police investigation gives way to an investigation of capital punishment by a Florida academic. Don't worry, the two story lines are related, though it takes us a while to put all the pieces together and feel comfortable with them. Carthage is typically Oatesian in that it employs multiple viewpoints to communicate the family's experience of loss. It is jarring in that it plays with reader expectations and disconcerting in the way it treats issues of the harm that can come from narcissism and excessive idealism, of which most of us are guilty at one time or another.