In the wake of her parents’ divorce, Cat, her mother, and her older brother move from suburban Detroit to Silver Lake, a Northern Michigan town sharply divided between fancy lakefront properties and cheap prefab homes. Divide it further-between what I mean and what I say.” This is not a novel of answered questions or clear-cut resolutions-like Cat, Buntin focuses on the way memory obscures and warps, and how the act of storytelling itself may be the closest thing we have to the truth.
Less interested in the circumstances of Marlena’s death, Cat wants to convey the impact that this fundamental friendship had on her life, realizing all the while that she’ll never be able to fully render Marlena, “in all her glorious complexity, all her unknowable Marlena-ness.” The heart of their intense, fleeting connection is multifarious: “It’s between me and her,” Cat says, “what I saw and what she saw and how I see it now and how she has no now. The premise sounds like a classic mystery, and though Marlena is propulsive and gripping, it is anti-climactic by design. Cat has never believed that what happened was “pure accident,” and a strange phone call from Marlena’s younger brother Sal sends Cat spiraling back to the months leading up to Marlena’s death. For Cat, a librarian and avid reader, storytelling is crucial, and she struggles to recount a tragedy from “a period of life so brief, it was over almost as soon as it started.” Within the first few pages of the novel we learn that Cat’s best friend Marlena died, “suffocat in less than six inches of ice-splintered river,” when the girls were teenagers. “Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me,” says Cat, the narrator of Julie Buntin’s riveting, assured debut novel Marlena.
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