Customer Reviews

Death of Innocence

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Buffie Cameron has a glamorous career as a flight attendant, doting parents, the man of her dreams, and she's sitting in a holding cell in New York City, waiting to be arraigned on a murder charge together with her boyfriend. Her parents rush to her side from a small town in Idaho to help her any way they can. What she needs is the best lawyer she can get, and the best is Marvin Hirsch.

Buffie's parents believe in her implicitly, but Hirsch isn't so sure. She's beautiful, manipulative, and an accomplished liar. She has her parents wrapped around her little finger. He'll get her off the hook, if he can, but the more he learns about her, the more he doubts he wants to. He takes the case for a nominal retainer, more to convince himself than her parents that rich Jewish lawyers aren't necessarily Shylocks; but he feels compassion for these parents who are investing so much time, money and love on a child who clearly isn't worth it. And as Buffie's mother learns more about the murder case and Buffie's relation with the victim, and about Buffie's sordid affair with her lover, a married man with a child, she realizes that the child she called "the sun and the moon and the stars" is a complete stranger to her, and probably always has been. The Camerons are devout Mormons and they've brought her up with good Christian, small-town American values. Little did they know Buffie has been conning her parents for years; they have doted on her, spoiled her, loved her without question, and all the while they never knew her. And how does Buffie feel about her parents? Shrug. They're nice people; they love her, give her whatever she wants, she uses them and dispenses with them as she does everyone else. Her one loyalty is to her lover, her prince charming, a stunningly handsome lowlife whose charm is all on the surface. He and Buffie are made for each other.

In this well-written novel, Zelda Popkin raises some tough questions: is love of a parent for a child always unconditional? Should a child need to earn a parent's love? And can a child do something terrible enough to destroy a parent's love? When Mrs. Cameron realizes that Buffie has lied repeatedly about her involvement in the murder of a trusting friend, and that her sole motive for the murder was to get hold of that friend's money, the mother is forced to admit that "I loved her and I cannot love her any more." The realization almost undoes her. Mrs. Cameron is faced with the most agonizing prospect any parent is called on to face, the decision to give up a child. Popkin is a sensitive writer and she brings us squarely into the middle of the mother's pain. There's a rather boring subplot involving Marvin Hirsch's own rebellious teenager who's going through some obnoxious changes; but the center of this book is Buffie's mother, Mrs. Cameron, and her pain when she belatedly realizes that, when raising a child, love alone is not enough.