Overview
In this original novel, fact and fiction intertwine in a story at once suspenseful and powerfully moving. It centers on the crime of the century. Sometimes ordinary men play major roles in a greater destiny. Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh neither know Joseph Shellenbach nor suspect that he is both the source of and the answer to the pain that has seared their lives and will haunt them for the rest of their days. They know only that someone has stolen their infant son, demanded ransom, then left behind his broken body. What they never know, or even suspect, is that the child they buried was not theirs but that of a young couple whose own baby had died tragically hours before the kidnapping. And they therefore never know the young man, named David, who grew up the son of a devoted father named Shell and an unstable mother named Helen. Shell locks away in the innermost darkness of his soul the secret of David's birth, guarding it with all the passion of a loving and protective father. Then comes a time of personal crisis when Shell must decide whether to tell David, now turning fifty, of his true birthright. Would David despise him? Though his real father has died, what of his real mother? Anne Lindbergh is still alive. What would the revelation of the existence of her firstborn do to her and her other children? And would David really want them to know the truth? Would he really want to know it himself?Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Fanciful, speculative history makes for dramatic storytelling in this imaginative, often poignant account of the abduction and supposed murder of the Lindbergh baby. Here Bruno Hauptmann (who was in fact convicted and executed on shaky evidence) is only an accessory to the kidnapping and never lays eyes on the child. The actual kidnapper is honest, hardworking "Shell" Shellenbach whose disreputable friend Rudy Farber concocts the scheme; in Coburn's telling the baby is never murdered. Shell agrees to Rudy's plan when his mentally fragile wife, Helen, accidentally drops and kills their own baby boy. Hoping to assuage Helen's grief, Shell keeps the Lindbergh child as a replacement, and the couple lovingly raise him as their own son, David. Secrecy and guilt provide their own torments for the adoptive parents, and the son learns his true origins only many years later, when Shell is on his deathbed and David is mounting a campaign for governor of Massachusetts. Coburn (Voices in the Dark) writes in clear, agile prose, rendering Shell as a decent man who must live with the consequences of a monstrous crime. Although Coburn returns to the Lindbergh house sporadically to trace the effects of the kidnapping and reported murder on Charles and Anne, the heart of the novel is Shell and David and the people closest to them who, without knowing it, are touched by David's hidden past. (Oct.)Library Journal
Ignoring recent revisionist studies of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Coburn's fictional re-creation of the "crime of the century" builds on the official interpretation. Bruno Hauptmann, who was executed for the crime, was involved in the kidnapping plot and shared the ransom money, but he did not kill the Lindbergh baby. In fact, no one did. The driver of the getaway car, a man named Shellenbach, buries the body of his own recently deceased son in the victim's clothes and takes Lindbergh's child home to his grief-stricken wife to replace "David." The plan backfires, and Shellenbach's wife suffers an emotional collapse, leaving him a single parent. Against the historical backdrop of the Eisenhower era, Vietnam, and Watergate, the young man goes to law school, defends leftists, marries money, and eventually runs for governor. Coburn is not so much interested in the crime itself as its effect on everyone involved. Despite a few jarring anachronisms (David's wealthy fiance attends Amherst College, an all-male school at the time), Coburn's evocation of intense states of guilt, remorse, and despair is masterful. Recommended for most fiction collections.Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los AngelesKirkus Reviews
Once again, Coburn (Voices in the Dark, 1994, etc.) uses crime as the point of departure for an examination of his troubled characters. This time, though, the crime is the crime of the century, and the canvas is uncommonly broad and rich.It all begins as a typical story of two kids from the Bronx, Rudy Farber and Joseph Shellenbach, competing for the favors of one Gretchen Krause (who says openly that she loves them both) and waiting for the big break that'll lift them out of their dead-end lives. Rolling-stone carpenter Rudy's idea of a big break is the ransom he's sure his latest client, Charles Lindbergh, will pay for the return of his son. But shortly after Rudy hatches his kidnapping plan—which will involve both Shell and Rudy's dim, honorable co-worker Bruno Richard Hauptmann as accomplices—Shell's own baby, David, dies, a casualty of his disturbed wife Helen. Aching to make Helen whole again, Shell carries out his part of the plan but adds a wrinkle by switching the children, leaving David to be found by the authorities who'll hunt down Hauptmann, and raising Charles Lindbergh Jr. as his own. The changeling can't halt Helen's slide toward twilit apathy, but he becomes the mainstay of his proud, agonized father's life. Coburn echoes Doctorow's Ragtime not only in his compounding of fiction, myth, and history, but in the syncopated, insistently metaphorical rhythms of his prose, which winnows years and decades down to mordant images as young David and his friends, echoing the fortunes of their forebears, find their bodies swelling and thrusting under their clothes, phone girlfriends or prostitutes once a week, then mark their advancing years by looking everywhere for handrails. Since nothing ever changes in Coburn's sad, dizzying view of history, it's only a matter of time—under Ronald Reagan, centrist Republican David is running for Massachusetts governor—when Shell confronts his son with the truth about his parentage.
A revelation almost unbearably tender and haunting.