THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY, by Claire Carusillo
While some of us stand to inherit a little cash or an old car, others may be left with a legacy of shipwreck survivors, shameless shenanigans, even murder. “I’ve been thinking about how the whole project of human existence is to set out to reverse the follies of the generation before,” says 31-year-old Claire Carusillo, the purveyor of this extraordinary tale who happens to share a name with her author. “Instead we replicate identical outcomes over and over and over and over again.”
Carusillo’s terrifically comic debut novel, “The Responsible Party,” succeeds by way of its outlandish story line as much as by its singular voice. We begin with some (autofictional? Seriously, look it up!) Carusillo family history: Claire’s great-great-grandmother Fanny Mounsey and great-great-aunt Sarah survived two different shipwrecks, one year apart: Fanny, the sinking of the R.M.S. Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1914, and Sarah, the torpedoing of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915.
Upon returning to their Chicagoland suburb, the mother and daughter, now known as “the Unsinkable Mounseys,” became celebrities on the “hyper-regional” vaudeville circuit, embellishing their legends and “consorting with carnies and flimflammers.”
From there Claire brings us to the present day, when a detective and a genetic genealogist show up at her door demanding a cheek swab. They’re investigating an unsolved murder case from the 1970s that may involve the Mounseys as well as Claire’s mother, Kath.
Our chronicler has hitherto been leading a subdued life with Kath and her unnamed father — “a private guy with a name like ‘David’ or ‘Craig’” — after imparting skin care advice online that one follower says nearly killed her. Now Claire presses her cagey mother to come clean. “Kath is about to hand off a secret that’s grown too slimy for her to hold alone.”
Apparently surviving a shipwreck takes luck and grit and a bit of a killer instinct. This is ours to ponder as Claire vapes her way through her mother’s confession, distilling it to its most entertaining essence.
Raised by the shipwreck survivors rather than by her own parents, 17-year-old Kath had a chance encounter while working at McDonald’s in 1971 that led her into the debauched world of Irving Oberbach, a middle-aged scion of the industrialist Oberbach family. In the condemned lighthouse he was renting for a buck a month on the shores of Lake Michigan, priapic adventures awaited. How this connects to the investigation remains to be seen.
Carusillo is a master of the vigorous and inclusive aside, employing a crackling blend of high and low diction. “I am rapt in my mother’s story, lost in young Kath’s giddy muddle of jejune fixation,” Claire narrates. “Then I am reminded that my mother is telling me a story about a dead body, not one about a high schooler who has a rocking-ass time at a boy-girl party.” Gallows humor abounds. Claire keeps herself afloat by granting meaning to everything within her powers to observe, and the whole glows. One could almost say there are no inanimate objects within these pages.
The narrative rollicks between the saga of the old biddies, ’70s high jinks and the murder investigation that promises to tie everything together. The three time periods entwine cogently, but discoveries along the way throw previously held truths into question. Told in sections that alternate between “My Inheritance” and “Their Legacy,” “The Responsible Party” affirms that we can’t necessarily escape the conduct of our predecessors, while gleefully celebrating, one smashing sentence at a time, that there’s alchemy to be found in the hands of the right legatee.
THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY | By Claire Carusillo | Holt | 326 pp. | $28.99
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