There is seemingly no way to review this book without spoilers, so I apologise and caution readers in advance, that if you do not want a spoiler, please stop reading the review now!
The book is not a work of fiction, it is a ‘memoir of a murder’, a real life story of the assault of the author’s brother, Tom Cummins, and the assault and murder of their cousins, Julie and Robin Kerry. It is an account of how an incident, seeming to blow up completely out of the blue, can change and end lives, and wreck whole families, and for many years afterwards too.
The Cummins family who are from Maryland, had been visiting their relatives in St Louis, and the cousins apparently had gotten along particularly well. Tom who was nineteen, had formed a strong bond with his 20 year old cousin, Julie. Julie and her younger sister, Robin (also nineteen), are also particularly close. On the eve of departure, Tom Cummins sneaks out of his grandparents’ house after the rest of his family have gone to bed, to spend a last evening chatting with and enjoying time with his two cousins. They drive to The Old Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi, and smoke, and discuss poetry and life and so on, and meet 4 young men who are seemingly on the bridge that night doing much the same.
However, those young men were looking for trouble. 3 out of the 4 of them gang raped the young women, and held Tom down and assaulted him. Then the young women were pushed off the bridge (almost certainly to their death, as their rapists knew full well), and Tom was made to jump and told he would be shot if he didn’t. All three ‘fell’ into the water, and Tom alone survived it, against the odds. However, his ordeal did not end there, because when he tried to get police help to find his cousins, the police ended up seeing him as chief suspect, and Tom was traumatised and abused by their callous treatment and rough handling. Even when his family and lawyer managed to get him out of prison without bail (because there was just no evidence for holding him), the media continued to persecute Tom and his family, and moreover, the bodies of the girls were still missing. (Julie’s was eventually found after some weeks, Robin’s never was.)
Cummins’ novel or memoir shares the experience of a family going through this ordeal, with all its shocks and grief and reactions. It is not that one expects Cummins to be unbiased, and indeed, it is very likely she has done her level best to be as objective as possible – and her account is definitely a sympathetic, reasonable account – but somehow, I cannot attest to having warmed much to it. It was definitely not without interest, but neither did I ever truly feel a sense of identification with any of the characters.
Towards the end of the account, near the end of the book, Cummins raises the race angle – which in my opinion, should have been raised much earlier and prominently. She only then reveals that 3 of the 4 attackers/murderers were black, and the one white attacker, the youngest and the only one who did not participate in the gang rape, was the only one offered a ‘deal’ – that if he would plead guilty, he would not be sentenced to death. Very likely, Cummins suppressed this angle throughout until near the end because she did not want this story to turn into a race story, and to have sides taken on account of colour and ethnicity, but there was still something slightly disingenuous about this.
Cummins tries very hard to be convincing and persuasive, but her writing style tends towards a lot of telling rather than showing. She would list a whole string of characteristics about a person, rather than letting the reader glean it for themselves from events. For example, she writes,
“He was a gifted man in many ways: extremely intelligent, articulate, persuasive, charismatic and funny, with great people skills – a natural performer” (p31)
This kind of listing does very little for the reader’s experience of the character.
She also tends to stereotype – she expects the reader to think or believe that someone is a good, reliable person because they fought for their country, or because they are a fireman, or some other such credibility trait. It rather oversimplifies characters and makes them two-dimensional. Some of her ways of eliciting the sympathy of readers did not quite work on me – for example, when after Tom is released from prison and his grandparents who had flown in from Florida to lend their support, take him out to Red Lobster, to give all the family a treat, Tom’s mother tries to persuade one of her daughters to eat, by putting a cheese bun on her plate. Relieved when her daughter who has not eaten for days, eats the bun, she offers her another.
Kay searched both baskets but came up empty handed. She was undeterred. Her daughter was eating again. Tink wanted cheese bread? Then by God, she would have cheese bread” (p230).
No doubt, this is supposed to make the reader think what a marvellous mother Kay is. But it is overdone and histrionic to the point of absurdity, making Kay look ridiculous instead of nurturing. Why would a person have to ‘search’ an empty bread basket – surely it is obvious it is empty? And ‘undeterred’? Surely this is rather strong language to use for merely finding more cheese buns in a restaurant where baskets of these are being handed out to every table, hardly something which needs a strong, undeterred spirit.
Then Cummins writes that
“Kay turned in her chair and scanned the room for their wayward waitress. She was nowhere to be found” (p220).
It seems very unfair to label the waitress ‘wayward’ just because she is not immediately in sight. Nowhere else had the account written anything about the waitress or that she was neglectful in any way. The over dramatization is not doing Cummins’ mother, Kay, any favours. In fact, the account continues that Kay steals a bun from another tray for her daughter, and then even lifts/steals a whole tray of cheese buns when a waitress had turned around,
“The kids giggled when the confused waitress turned back to her now-empty tray” (p220).
This does not come across as any clever or brave act on Kay’s part. Why she did not just ask the waitress for more cheese buns, why she had to behave like a silly kid, stealing cheese buns from the poor waitress rather than just ordering more, and why her family found this heroic, is beyond me. In all likelihood, this is just poor writing, or poor judgement on the author’s part.
It was hard to warm to that kind of unintelligent writing, however, even if the overall account was of interest, and clearly well researched, and heartfelt in its rendering or recounting. It is an interesting read, but it is hard to forgive poor writing. I expected better of Jeanine Cummins because I had read her other novel, American Dirt (2018), which I had found good and worth recommending to others. A Rip In heaven, first published in 2004, was probably a much earlier and less polished piece of work. There was a flash in this book of the better writing which Cummins has showed herself capable of later, in a letter she wrote to Amnesty International, when she found out the organisation may be championing the murderers and protesting their death sentence; that letter was well crafted, balanced, heartfelt but extremely well reasoned, and was in a different league from most of the rest of the book.
That said, perhaps one can overlook some shortcomings in the book if one takes into account Cummins’ reason for writing this – she tells us in the Afterword that the attention is often on the murders, not on their victims, and indeed, when they get given death sentences, they become seen as victims. She wrote the book because she wanted her cousins to be remembered; she makes the point that the murders have a voice and still get heard, but those who are killed do not. It is a worthy reason for writing the account from the perspective of the victims’ family; perhaps Cummins just needed still more distance to be able to produce her best writing.
Recent Comments