Volume 45, Number 10 · June 11, 1998
What Happened in Hudson County?
By Luc Sante
Freedomland
by Richard Price
Broadway Books, 546 pp., $25.00
The source for the outline of Richard Price's sixth novel will be immediately obvious to its readers. On October 25, 1994, Susan Smith rolled her Mazda down an incline into John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina, drowning her two sons, three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alex. She claimed to police that her car, with the two boys inside, had been stolen by a black man. Nine harrowing days later she confessed to the crime, and after a brief trial was sentenced to life in prison, where she remains under suicide watch. The case was almost unbelievably emblematic, the vortex of an array of up-to-the-minute pathological trends: parents killing their children, whites ascribing their crimes to blacks, the legacy of sexual abuse of children by parents upon the following generation. Susan Smith was called 'a frightening enigma' by People; she reminded others of Medea. There was also in her story a trace of Clyde Griffith's thwarted ambition, in Dreiser's An American Tragedy: she had been dating the boss's son, and blamed the failure of the relationship on her children.
Review, 3025 words
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