A great horned owl sits high in a white pine above a sleeping town, watching a car and a train converge on the same crossing. It cannot do the arithmetic, the narration observes, but it would cover its ears if it could. A few pages later, in a sunny kitchen, a young woman on the couch reads the news aloud: a boy from her brother’s high school class has been killed. Her mother is cutting rind off a watermelon. Juice runs onto the counter while the family tries to remember whether the dead boy did theatre or tech. Wreck by Catherine Newman is built on that collision of the trivial and the terrible, and on a family that keeps talking through both.
A Stranger’s Death, Taken Personally
The narrator, Rocky, is a writer in western Massachusetts, two years on from the Cape Cod summer of Sandwich. She did not know Miles Zapf. That does not stop her. She searches his name at night, studies his mother’s posts, donates anonymously to the funeral fund and then, in a passage of real self-knowledge, admits that she stood at the edge of the burial among people who belonged there. Newman lets her know exactly how creepy this is. The novel is funny about her compulsion and serious about what lies under it, which is the terror of every parent that some ordinary afternoon will take a child away.
The book also knows a good deal about how such accidents happen. Gates that should have come down, warning lights that may have failed, sensors that should have braked the train: the investigation unfolds through local news and family arguments, and anyone who drives across tracks will find themselves thinking about how to cross a railway line safely afterwards. Then the story arrives at Rocky’s own door. The freight company, it emerges, had used the consulting firm where her son works, and his team had helped to frame the cost-cutting that preceded the crash.
The Son Who Is Also a Stranger
This is the richest thread in Wreck by Catherine Newman, and the one the novel handles most cautiously. Jamie is sweet, sociable and kind; he volunteers, he adores his family, he was liked at school. Rocky has always taken that sunny nature as proof of goodness. Now she has to ask whether the two are the same thing. Her daughter Willa, anxious and fiercely principled, becomes the family’s conscience, and her reaction to the news is the most distressing scene in the book.
The trouble is that the confrontation keeps being postponed. Conversations circle, Rocky rehearses speeches she does not give, and when mother and son finally talk, the exchange is honest but brief, nudged towards forgiveness before its hardest questions are answered. Willa’s sharper critique simply fades. Miles himself remains a photograph and a set of social-media posts, a catalyst for other people’s feelings. A late scene honouring his memory partly redeems this, but readers may wish Wreck by Catherine Newman had given the dead boy, and the moral cost, more weight.
A Body in Open Revolt
Running alongside is Rocky’s illness: a rash that spreads, results that contradict each other, specialists who rule things out. Newman is very good on the solitary nights with a phone and a patient portal, and on small kindnesses, such as the rheumatologist who stops mid-examination to ask how Rocky is actually feeling and reduces her to tears. The comic voice is relentless, though, and the cycle of test, panic, joke, wait repeats often enough in the second half to slacken the pace.
Holding it all together is Rocky’s ninety-two-year-old father, a widower living in the cottage behind the house. He is vague, dry, and capable of wounding with a single remark. He is also capable of shuffling over with an ancient bottle of calamine lotion when he sees her skin, the gesture of a man who cannot say what he means. And he carries the book’s grief for his late wife, and his scenes are its best.
There is a wider circle, too, and it gives Wreck by Catherine Newman much of its texture. Rocky’s best friend since their eldest children shared a preschool class appears for a night at a campground that turns, under the influence of a little cannabis, into a long fit of laughter over nursery rhymes and an argument heard through a tent wall. Willa’s friend Sunny, who once lived with the family, drifts through the kitchen as if she still does. The household is crowded, untidy and porous, and the novel’s real subject may be how many people a family can hold before it tips over.
Catherine Newman Sets the Thanksgiving Table, Argument Included
The novel moves through a full autumn, and its central stretch is a holiday. On Thanksgiving Day sleet comes down, Rocky is in her pyjamas pulling giblets out of a bird that is still half frozen, and the house fills with relatives, neighbours and lab-mates. The small frictions of the day, a smeared glass door, a quarrel over what to call her, give way to a walk in the wet woods where she and her son finally speak. For a reader choosing a book for the long weekend, Wreck by Catherine Newman offers exactly that experience: a loving family around a crowded table with something unresolved under it. Readers should know, in a sentence, that the book involves a violent accidental death, suicide speculation, grief, a panic attack, invasive medical procedures and constant profanity.
Catherine Newman, Behind the Rocky Books
Catherine Newman lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and for years wrote essays and food pieces, including for the cooking magazine Taste, before turning to adult fiction. Her first novel, We All Want Impossible Things (2022), grew out of the death of a close friend in 2015 and follows two women through a hospice stay with a surprising amount of laughter. Sandwich (2024) introduced Rocky and her family on their annual week at the beach.
The new novel is a sequel but a forgiving one; it explains enough for newcomers, and the earlier book mainly deepens the history between the characters. The kitchen-table register of both books, where food, illness and jokes share a single sentence, is recognisably the voice Newman spent decades refining in her nonfiction.
Where It Leaves You
Wreck by Catherine Newman is warmer than it is rigorous, and it would rather hold its characters than judge them. That is its limit and also its charm. Readers who know the holiday-weekend unravelling of Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm will find a far gentler cousin here; those who liked the mother, grown daughters and late-life reckonings of Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake will find a kindred spirit. Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette shares its comic, frantic mother. The ending reaches for gratitude and gets there by a slightly sweeter road than the book has earned, but the family at its centre stays with the reader long after the leftovers are gone.