In 1991, four teenage girls, two of them sisters, were bound and gagged with their own clothes, raped, and shot to death in an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop that was then set on fire. Austin, Texas, was still a small town at the time, but the yogurt shop murders would have been big news anywhere; something about the juxtaposition between the brutality of the still-unsolved crime and the soft-serve sweetness of the yogurt shop is hard to shake. And of course, there were all those young girls, who were apparently planning a slumber party later that night.
Scott Blackwood’s second novel, “See How Small,” imagines the impact of a similar crime on those whose lives it changed forever. Blackwood, a longtime Austin resident who recently relocated to Evanston, blurs the details, making it three girls instead of four and changing the unglamorous fro-yo chain into an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor; but the bones of the real murder remain visible underneath, and Blackwood leaves the time-period of the events deliberately vague, dating it only in the sense of leaving it in a fuzzy pre-Internet timelessness.
This fuzziness is a sound choice, given the book’s themes. Although most of the events occur five years after the crime, the characters seem suspended in its trauma indefinitely: Kate, the mother of two of the girls; Jack, the firefighter who found their bodies; Michael, tangentially involved in the crime but not actually present when the girls were killed; and Hollis Finger, a bystander too mentally muddled to convey valuable information to the police. The girls speak as well, sometimes in present tense, as if the crime were still happening, sometimes as ghosts frozen at the age they were when the crime was committed, and sometimes as nothing more than a cloud of lost possibilities.
As promised by its title, “See How Small” treats its subject matter atomically, in chapters so brief they often feel more like stanzas in a narrative poem than chapters in a novel. In each chapter, a character has just enough time to conduct one small action — laundry, say — and make one observation. The effect is something like dust motes swirling around a central mystery, coalescing just long enough to form a picture of something bigger before whirling apart again: “(Kate) watches the clothes tumble in the dryer window and thinks of tiny particles falling through an endless void and how by chance a few collide with others. How all the stars, planets, animals, and people came to exist by collisions like this and will one day fizzle out into nothing … See? we say. See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?“
If observations like this occasionally threaten to weigh down such a feather-weight book, the most successful come from Hollis Finger, a recognizably Austin-ish type of semi-vagrant who lives in a shell-encrusted art car. Mentally ill characters are often used to deliver symbolism, and Hollis is no exception; but Blackwood’s musical prose is a particularly good fit for a schizophrenic, and it sings in Hollis’ chapters: “I will not forget you,” he thinks, encountering the girls on the last day of their lives, “I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand.” The image gracefully captures the element of choice, even creativity, in memory; it also hints at a certain violence. Be careful which memories become a part of your identity, it seems to say. A fingerprint is not so different from a scar.
The voices of the murdered girls, always rendered collectively in first-person plural, are less substantial. Despite their superficial differences, the dead girls blur together the way dead girls always seem to, aestheticized by tragedy, as in “The Virgin Suicides.” In both books, the girls are meant to be unknowable, or at least permanently out of reach. But “See How Small” is also full of missing girls who are still alive — girls who run away or are temporarily lost, echoing the central murders — none of whom get a sustained or convincing point of view.
Then again, in some sense, none of the characters, even the girls, feel more important than the ensemble. In 2009, the frozen-yogurt shop murders made news again when two men who were jailed for the crime had to be released because DNA evidence failed to incriminate them. In the nearly two decades between 1991 and 2009, Austin had changed from a small town where everyone was connected to a mini-metropolis swollen with the ranks of outsiders. It’s tempting to link the unsolved, historic crime at the heart of this book to the discomfort and mild xenophobia of the present era, in which Austinites frequently express anxieties over not recognizing their own town. If Blackwood is channeling this unheimlich quality, it’s only one of the patterns you can read in this slight but lyrical and elegiac novel.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate in English and writes a weekly style column called “The Good Eye.”
“See How Small”
By Scott Blackwood, Little, Brown, 211 pages, $25