A Trick of Nature: A Novel

Greg Goodman is a very ordinary guy—a not-very-ambitious school teacher and football coach who takes his attractive wife, Patty, their twin adolescent daughters, and the comfortable ease of their suburban routine for granted. Until lightening strikes—both literally and figuratively—as Greg runs a pattern with his junior varsity team during a muggy August practice and fifteen-year-old Timothy Phelps is directly struck. This crisis threatens to unravel all the strands anchoring Greg to his normal habits of being. When Timothy's mother, a stripper and addict who abandoned Timothy as a child, enters the mix, Greg discovers his own complicated and misguided longings. As in her debut novel, Suzanne Matson employs "crisp, clean writing…[and] compassionately drawn characters" (New York Times Book Review) to create a gripping story about the nature of love, trust, family, and marriage. Set in a seemingly safe world of split-levels and carefully tended lawns, A Trick of Nature powerfully captures the characters' emerging self-awareness as they are forced to test the assumptions they hold about themselves and the connections that bind them.

About the Author :
Suzanne Matson, a 2012 fellow in fiction writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, is the author of four novels and two collections of poetry. She teaches at Boston College and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Review :
"Like Ann Hood and Sue Miller, Suzanne Matson captures average people reevaluating their once comfortable domesticity as middle age slowly approaches. In delivering the Goodmans’ stumbling marriage, A Trick of Nature plumbs the attractions and terrors of giving up the familiar for an uncertain freedom." "A Trick of Nature is a perceptive, unnerving account of the fault lines destabilizing contemporary family life. Patty and Greg Goodman seem to have it all: nice kids, nice jobs, nice marriage. Then a few bad choices transform them into people they hardly recognize. Suzanne Matson has written an absorbing, elegant novel that feels hauntingly familiar, but remains surprising to the end." "A compassionate psychological portrait of one family’s slow unraveling—A Trick of Nature skillfully charts the often unpredictable aftershocks of tragedy." "A page-turner that sheds the facade of one family’s seemingly perfect existence as the reader rushes to its end." "[An] eloquent second novel…Describing the sustenance derived from family is Matson’s metier, and she portrays it here in an especially tender, emotionally revealing way. She effortlessly shifts the narrative between Greg’s point of view and Patty’s, beautifully illuminating the inner lives of a family stubbornly held together by a persistent love." "So skillfully does Matson describe the calm before the marital storm that it’s possible to be lulled right along with them into their own blind harmony."