Cutter Wood

When one looks for insights into the difficulties of maintaining a romantic relationship, the disappearance and murder of a married woman by her ex-inmate boyfriend seems an unlikely totem, but totem Cutter Wood makes of it—and therein finds a trove.

In Love and Death in the Sunshine State, Wood wants to uncover nothing less than a grand coherence in the human experience. Just past the book’s midpoint he writes, “I had no interest in the murder; I knew that I could never commit such a crime. But I recognized a kinship, however faint, between that act and the uncaring words that had already become a habit in my own relationship.” It’s an engrossing approach, and it turns a book you at first think is about a homicide into a book about the ordinary ways in which love fails to save us.

As well, it’s a pleasure to watch Wood subvert the genre in which he putatively writes. Each sentence indicts sentimentality, refuses to leer at the macabre. Throughout, the author gapes not at horror but at mundanity. Here he is looking at photographs taken by detectives of the apartment where the attack occurred: “I was drawn to these images, I think, precisely because of how commonplace they seemed….On a side table, there is a scorecard for a board game, an empty wine bottle, and a remote control. They reminded me of the aimless photographs that children take, confusing precisely because it is impossible to say just why they were taken. They seemed almost like they could have come from any life.” And that’s the point, to focus on shared impulses within human intimacy.

Does he pass judgment on his subjects? If so, he equally and cerebrally indicts himself, and, implicitly—this is the grand connection—the reader. We all fail at times in our relationships, we all yearn to have done better, to have embraced love more fully.

The prose is simply impeccable—lyrically lush yet absent of all ego; smart, savvy, and self-aware like an ideal train compartment companion; and—for all my observations I haven’t mentioned one of its most delightful points—it’s the funniest book of true crime I’ve read, the humor coming at distinct gemlike moments, e.g. “The motel formed a narrow horseshoe, the top of the U facing the road and a fallow field, the U’s bottom concealing—I could just hear its gurgle—a brook, where one could imagine a few abandoned grocery carts upended on the rocks or the kerchiefed remains of a missing Boy Scout.” A dry, human humor, if you will, pervades.

Throughout, Wood shows the courage to look open-eyed at the people and things around him and to document how he applies what he sees to his own life. He takes the artistic risk of reinventing the story from multiple perspectives, yet he sold me at every turn.

Superbly written.… (más)

First time author Cutter Wood was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa when he was drawn to the story of the disappearance of a woman in Florida. Sabine was a motel owner on Anna Maria Island, near Tampa, when she disappeared. Her estranged husband, ex-con boyfriend, and the man who stole her abandoned car are all suspected. Wood is an author in search of a story to tell and he travels to Florida to interview the principals. The strongest part of the book is where he projects how the relationship between the ex-con and Sabine developed, and led to murder. The weakest is where he tries to create parallels with his own new relationship with the woman who was to become his wife.… (más)