JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ'S 1998 novel, "Reservation Road," was acclaimed by critics and readers alike, translated into many languages and, almost a decade later, turned into a well-regarded movie of the same name. Ricocheting in brief, staccato chapters among the perspectives of its main characters, Schwartz's narrative depicted the shattering consequences of a hit-and-run accident on two Connecticut families. It ended with Dwight, the driver who killed a 10-year-old boy, about to confess to the police and go off to jail. But it also hinted that the families' two surviving children - Dwight's son, Sam, and the dead boy's sister, Emma - would suffer the true emotional fallout of this tragedy. I can see why Schwartz believed a sequel was justified. The effects of random violence, grief and loss on the human psyche are endlessly interesting, and there seemed plenty left to explore as the first novel came to a close. You could argue that Dwight's incarceration was as much a beginning as an ending. This new novel moves us 12 years on. Dwight, having served his prison term, is now working in a sporting goods store in Southern California, attempting to rebuild his life, far from his ex-wife and son. Back on the East Coast, the dead boy's parents have separated. Struggling to run her gardening business, Emma's mother is demanding that she help out while on vacation from her studies at Yale. Just like its begetter, "Northwest Corner" begins with a violent episode. In a barroom brawl, Sam, now a senior in college, hits someone with a baseball bat, sending him straight to the I.C.U. And, as his father had once done, he flees the scene of the crime. Although Sam hasn't seen or even spoken to Dwight in all these years, his first impulse is to seek him out. This novel - a structural twin of "Reservation Road" - ought to work. Both its characters and its situations at first appear robust and real, and Schwartz seems genuinely interested in exploring their moral complexity. This is exactly the kind of setup I normally admire, so it's with great reluctance that I have to report that "Northwest Corner" is one of the most maddening pieces of fiction I've encountered in some time. Strangely, Schwartz both over- and underwrites. He's constantly telling us what his characters are feeling instead of allowing us to watch them and decide for ourselves. The effect is at once distancing and frustrating. In one particularly implausible passage, Dwight, who has not been portrayed as extremely articulate, stands outside his house and ruminates about the "sheer cosmic improbability" of the "poorly drawn road map that's led me to this place over time, to this street and this house and this half-lived life." The novel's literary references feel equally unearned and self-conscious. Emma thinks her father wants her to see him as "Sisyphus," and Dwight's girlfriend can't stop lines from Louise Glück's poetry from popping into her head as she cracks eggs for an omelet. Dwight himself makes sure to mention the letters of Elizabeth Bishop, a collection his girlfriend happened to be carrying the first time he met her. Conversely, Schwartz often doesn't seem to work hard enough. The devices he uses to suggest his characters' emotional states are lazy and forced. Chapters end with someone gazing contemplatively at the telephone or brooding behind the wheel of a car. And then there are the clumsy similes and metaphors - "as hard and cool as a Greek statue," "no more in control of the situation than a man trying to ride an emu," and, most labored of all: "We think we are solid and durable, only to find that, placed under a cruel and unexpected light, we are the opposite. . . . Hemophiliacs walking through a forest of thorns." Thinking about Sam, Emma experiences "a raw need unlike anything she's known before," but soon finds herself "fitted onto him like a missing part, a hovering sack of need." When Sam is standing in the dark, having just kissed Emma, he suddenly remembers "his mother baking an elderberry pie." You have to wonder if Schwartz actually recalls what it's like to be a 22-year-old. Most perplexing of all are the Statements of the Blindingly Obvious, ponderous aperçus Schwartz presumably meant to be atmospheric, which wouldn't be out of place on needlework samplers. "You can do all the planning you want, or you can do none: once their bags are packed, people leave." "You may do your time, but you will never really get out." "There are invited guests, and there are the other kind." Schwartz seems to have secured a place among America's serious novelists, and many readers have clearly been moved and convinced by his prose. Yet for me, "Northwest Corner" is the antithesis of what a serious novel should be. If such writing can pass for muscular fiction, what hope is there for authors who spend long hours deleting easy clichés and pointless similes, working hard to create something that feels startling and real and true? Schwartz's new novel explores the effects of random violence, grief and loss on the human psyche. Julie Myerson's latest book is "The Lost Child."

A postgame bar fight leaves college baseball player Sam on the run and wondering whether he and his estranged father share a violent streak or at least bad judgment. His father, Dwight, can never make up for the accident that took a boy's life or repair his career or the family he left 12 years ago. Instead, he is going through the motions of starting over after serving his prison sentence until the day Sam arrives on his doorstep unannounced and troubled. In his fifth novel (after The Commoner), Schwartz explores the lives of characters damaged by circumstances and bad decisions, so it is gratifying when they move beyond crippling self-recrimination and begin their lives again. He adds depth to the characters he introduced in Reservation Road. VERDICT A well-crafted selection, ideal for readers with a taste for moral ambiguity. Readers of Reservation Road will enjoy continuing the stories of these two families, linked by tragedy, while those who haven't yet discovered this powerful writer are in for a treat.-Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ., Arlington, VA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Twelve years after Dwight Arno has been released from prison for his involvement in a tragic hit-and-run that resulted in the death of a young boy (events detailed in Reservation Road, 1999), he has fashioned a new life for himself in sunny Santa Barbara, California. Yet every day he replays the events that forever altered the trajectory of his life and resulted in his estrangement from his own son. Then Sam, now a college student, shows up on his doorstep. Angry over a key loss in a championship baseball game, Sam became embroiled in a violent fight and seriously injured another man, who now lies in a coma in a Connecticut hospital. Wracked with guilt, Sam believes his father might be the only one who can truly understand his sudden troubled circumstances, yet Sam finds he is still not able to completely let go of his anger over losing his dad to prison. As the two try to forge a connection, Schwartz traces, in highly burnished prose, the fragile dynamics of a father-son relationship and the painful transformation of one family as it struggles to heal itself. . HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This is the sequel to Schwartz's best-selling Reservation Road (1999), which was also made into a high-profile movie for which he wrote the screenplay; his latest will be pitched to book clubs and promoted via an author tour and online advertising.--Wilkinson, Joann. Copyright 2010 Booklist

The literary tradition of the middle-class American male as a creaky vessel teetering on the verge of moral meltdown yet struggling to reconstruct himself has found its latest and arguably most adept practitioner in Schwartz (Reservation Road). Like Johnny Hake and Harry Angstrom before him, Dwight Arno is a man who has done wrong. A Connecticut tax lawyer disbarred after a fatal hit and run accident, he does not expect a chance at redemption, but it arrives in the form of his son, Sam, who makes a mad dash across the country and shows up at his estranged father's front door after a vicious bar fight puts an end to his dreams of baseball stardom. Pontificating discourses masquerading as stream-of-consciousness mar the narrative at times and inject a sanctimonious streak, but Schwartz is otherwise exceptional at describing the chemistry of desire, creating emotional tension, and making his characters feel more like flesh and blood than fictional constructs. Imaginative and taut, Schwartz's writing is seamless and infinitely inspired. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.