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Summary
Snapshots
Susie talks about the pictures she took of her family.
Abigail leaves for New Hampshire.
Neighbors leave casseroles.
Grandma Lynn comes to stay.
In December 1975, Harvey has been gone a year and Lindsey finds her mother’s scarf on Len’s desk.
A seven-year-old Buckley builds Susie a fort.
In the fall of 1976, Len looks at the evidence gathered from Harvey’s house. Susie feels sorry for him because he failed to solve the murder, and he feels guilty because Harvey got away while he was with Abigail.
That September, a hunter finds Susie’s charm near the bones of a child’s foot.
That same fall, Abigail goes west. She ends up in California, where she gets a job at Krusoe Winery.
The impromptu memorial has become a tradition and Susie finds it uncomfortable when strangers say her name.
After graduating early, Ray Singh goes to Penn to study to be a doctor.
In June 1977, Ruth leaves for New York and Grandma Lynn gives Buckley a book on gardening.
Sometimes Abigail calls from California.
In New York, Ruth finds the world of dead women and girls as real as Earth.
Ray studies death.
Harvey scratches out a rough existence along the Acela corridor.
Samuel’s older brother Hal becomes friends with Buckley.
In December 1981, Len gets a call from a Delaware detective, who has connected a murder in his state to a body found in Connecticut in 1976. The detective tells Len about the charm.
Hal talks to a Hell’s Angel named Ralph Cichetti, who believes his mother, Sophie, was murdered by a man who built dollhouses. Hal calls Len.
Susie looks at the photographs of her family, both those she took while alive and the ones created in her mind through her observations from heaven over the years.
The family dog Holiday arrives in heaven and almost knocks Susie over with his joy.
Analysis
“Snapshots,” one of two titled chapters, uses the familiar genre of the photograph as its organizing principle. Moving briskly across eight years, it presents brief snippets of action, isolating them as noteworthy (or not) in the manner of a quick snapshot. Reading the chapter is much like looking at a photo album. Little narrative connection is made between each entry, although it is easy enough to see and feel the passage of time. Not only does this formal change emphasize the importance of Susie’s photographs to the novel’s meaning, it also changes the novel’s relationship to time. Time moves agonizingly slowly at first, as the family seeks answers about Susie’s death, but now, once it’s become clear that there are few answers to be had, it passes much more swiftly. There are still important events—high school graduations and advances in the investigation—but the chapter creates the sense of numbed regularity.
Notable among more banal observations, like the kindness of neighbors, is Abigail’s decision to leave the family, going first to New Hampshire and then to California. The structure of this chapter makes it easier to elide how this decision must have felt to Lindsey, Buckley, Jack, and then Grandma Lynn, all of whom stayed in Norristown. It also means that any dilemma Susie might have felt about which part of her family to observe happens outside the novel. When the numbered chapters begin, the years of estrangement are coming to an end and the novel’s emphasis falls on the process of reconciliation. Because Abigail was unhappy before Susie’s death, as the picture of her as the “mother-stranger” reveals, this narrative choice also brings Abigail’s struggles into the story without ever supplanting her daughter’s central role.
The chapter is also honest about the temporal structure of criminal investigations. While fictional detective narratives often suggest the speedy resolution of a crime, with one clue leading inevitably to the next, the reality is that it often takes years for bits of evidence to be found and reassembled into an accurate account of what happened. The chapter’s short sections are not so different, in other words, from clues, making it possible to reconstruct what life was like for the Salmons, and for Len, across the years. Importantly, although Len had wanted to solve the case on his own, the evidence of Harvey’s guilt comes from others—Hal’s conversation with a member of a motorcycle gang and the careful investigation of a Delaware detective. No one person can get to the truth of what happened to Susie, just as no one member of the Salmon family can find a way to accept Susie’s fate on their own.
