"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Yeats's words seem fitting for the slowly disintegrating Airie family and their son Pilot, a schizophrenic. Twenty years ago, Pilot's little sister, Fiona, disappeared. In the aftermath, the Airie family fell apart--"unraveled," Pilot observes. Old sins have long shadows, and Pilot both welcomes and fears the darkness those shadows offer. His memories of Fiona's disappearance haunt him, but they are also an anchor to a past that seems more authentic than the present.

Pilot's schizophrenia is all the more poignant contrasted with the poise of his older brother Eric, a prominent neurosurgeon. Eric is the one who comes to his mother's rescue when she is stranded on the highway, unable to see to drive home after Pilot's attempt to help her devolves into a terrifying, emotional paralysis: Did they know that things had become transparent again, clear as a blue sky seen through blue water? That I could actually see the cancer forming like a tulip bulb at the base of my mother's optical nerve? I could look through the trees all the way to the highway, through her car, and through her hair and skin and cartilage and bone into the folds of tissue around her eyes, to see the muscles dilating, the tendrils of nerves and vessels of blood, and the radical cells dividing there, and dividing again. Division also lies at the core of the relationship between Pilot and Eric. Drifting between past and present, the narrative reveals a long history of cruelty and abuse, which, after festering for years, erupts into what Eric's therapist dryly terms "a major psychotic episode." What could be crazier than accusing your brother of murdering your sister? Pilot's struggle to remember the truth of his family's history calls into question the very natures of truth, memory, individuality, and complicity.

The novel's strength lies in the deftness with which author Peter Moore Smith captures Pilot's schizophrenia. The reader follows Pilot in each unsteady attempt to negotiate the ever-fluctuating boundary between reality and illusion: "Eyes closed, I was in a bed upstairs, my arms under the covers so they wouldn't float away. Outside the window a single branch was reaching toward the room, unfurling itself to tap against the glass, warning me." Raveling weaves the fragile threads that bind families and selves into a tapestry that both cloaks its characters and leaves them starkly vulnerable. --Kelly Flynn

From Publishers Weekly
This first novel depends a great deal on gimmicks. The hero, from whose disturbed point of view much of the story is told, is the oddly named Pilot Airie (his father was an airline pilot). Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, his life has been off the rails ever since his younger sister, Fiona, disappeared mysteriously during a drunken party his parents threw during his childhood. His older brother, Eric, is a cool, collected neurosurgeon; his mother is a quondam medical specialist, whose eyesight seems to be unaccountably vanishing and whose mental state is increasingly disoriented. The overriding question, to which an attractive young psychotherapist, the elaborately named Katherine Jane De Quincey-Joy, must address herself, as she treats Pilot and begins an affair with Eric, is: whatever happened to Fiona 20 years ago, and can she do anything about it? The problem with much of this fitfully gripping, but just as often irritating, book is that much of the action is seen through Pilot's eyes, and he is a notoriously unreliable witness; he also appears to be omnipresent and all-knowing, which makes him a convenient substitute for the author. There is some vivid writing, and a certain eerie atmosphere is created around this weird family. But Moore Smith seems so intent on tricking the readerAinnumerable red herrings are cast before us as to the real guilt in Fiona's disappearanceAthat one tends to lose patience with the whole proceeding. When even the dead Fiona is granted a narrative voice, briefly, about her grisly demise, it seems that authorial license has overrun the mark. Moore Smith has talentAhis evocation of the trauma created over the years by Fiona's fate is tellingAbut his book is too disorganized and ill-focused to be an effective thriller, and too determined to provide some lurid chills to be the imaginative literary fiction it aspires to. (July) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Though revolving around the 20-year-old unsolved disappearance of a young girl, Smith's exceptional first novel is foremost a tale of family. Since his sister's vanishing, diagnosed schizophrenic Pilot Airie has had plenty of time to question his sanity and wonder if he truly recalls what happened on the evening of her disappearance. With the help of Katherine, the psychologist appointed to help him after a recent episode, Pilot attempts to remember that fateful night to begin his own healing process. While Pilot's account is the centerpiece of the story, each member of his family must undergo a catharsis: the control-freak brother, the mother who can't accept the breakup of her family, and the distant father who can't stop blaming himself for his daughter's disappearance. This wonderfully simple, engaging, and well-written story deserves a spot in public library fiction collections.---Craig Shufelt, Gladwin Cty. Lib., MI Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Entertainment Weekly, 7/21/00
"...as original as it is absorbing...a resolution that's satisfying on both a narrative and moral level."

From AudioFile
With its opening lines, listeners will know this is no ordinary mystery. Pilot James Airie, a diagnosed schizophrenic named after his father's career as an airline pilot, decides to take it upon himself to put the family back together twenty years after the disappearance of his sister. Eric Stoltz lends to this audiobook the vocal finesse of a surgeon, injecting the slightest amount of color into each character, making them each stand out as individuals in their pain, denial, and eventual acceptance of their lives. Listeners will be taken by surprise with this dark and intricately woven tale of a family's journey toward wholeness. R.A.P. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
The narrator of this haunting blend of mystery and magic realism, Pilot James Aire, witnessed the unraveling of his family and his own sanity after his sister disappeared at the age of seven. Twenty years later, on coming home to care for his ailing mother, Aire determines to "ravel" the threads of what happened to his sister and his family. Aire is hampered by his know-it-all older brother, a neurosurgeon, and doubts about his own mental competence, as he swings in and out of psychotic episodes and suicidal longings. The reader is constantly baffled by whether the chilling revelations uncovered by this unreliable narrator are to be believed. The quicksilver changes in Aire's thinking about what happened to his little sister, and who is responsible, and the zigzagging of the plot from past to present to Aire's own no-man's land of doubt and grief make this a challenging thriller. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Kirkus Reviews
A classy suspense debut pitting two men against each other in that struggle between brothers that's as old as the Bible.In this version, you're not quite sure who's Cain and who's Abel until the author is ready to let you figure it out. Eric Fairlie and younger brother Pilot (named by their flier father in an early attempt to influence career choice) furnish little evidence that they share a gene pool. Eric is brilliant, handsome, and a successful neurosurgeon while Pilot is not noticeably handsome, brilliant, or by any measure successful. Diagnosed a schizophrenic, Pilot battles to stay tuned into reality—to keep his feet on the ground, as it were, in an ironic subversion of Dad's hopes for him. There was a third Fairlie sib, Fiona, who vanished 20 years ago at age seven, never to be found despite an all-out police search. Fiona's mysterious disappearance soured an already shaky fraternal relationship. Did Eric play a part in whatever disaster befell her? Pilot insists that Eric killed her brutally and cold-bloodedly. But Pilot is delusional: his therapist says so, and so does everyone else, no one more emphatically than Pilot himself. Yet suddenly Pilot claims to have in his possession a gore-encrusted knife and a tennis shoe last seen on Fiona's small foot, though he won't tell where they're hidden. If such evidence in fact exists, who does it really implicate? In other words, who is raveling and who is unraveling? Skillfully shifting his points of view, Smith keeps us close to his characters, interested in their complexities, and guessing about their motives. Stylish, substantive, and savvy. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly, 9/4/00
"Stolz gives a sensitive, nuanced performance of this psychological suspense thriller..."

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
Good first novels are always cause for celebration, and the current year, though barely past the half-way mark, has already offered us several: Sheldon Siegel's Special Circumstances, Andrew Pyper's Lost Girls, and Stephen Horn's In Her Defense, to name only a few. The latest addition to this distinguished group of debuts is Peter Moore Smith's Raveling, an ambitious, accomplished novel that operates successfully on a number of levels: as a thriller, as an unsparing account of a family undone by grief and loss, and as a complex experiment in narrative point of view.

Raveling tells the story of the Airie family of rural New York, a family torn apart by a senseless, unresolved tragedy. Twenty years before the primary narrative begins, the youngest of the Aerie children, seven-year-old Fiona, disappears during the course of a crowded, drunken Labor Day party. Her body is never found and, in spite of a massive, protracted investigation, no one is ever implicated in her disappearance. Two decades later, Fiona remains a troubling presence, haunting the surviving members of her family, and transforming the novel into a kind of realistic, non-traditional ghost story.

In the aftermath of Fiona's disappearance, the Aerie family literally unravels. The parents -- Hannah, a physical therapist, and James, a pilot with a history of infidelity -- eventually divorce. The youngest son, nine-year-old Pilot, begins a lifelong process of psychological withdrawal. Following a bizarre episode in which he sees himself as the Wolf Boy -- a creature bereft of language and disconnected from his own species -- he settles into a less dramatic series of personal failures, ending up as a homeless drifter living on the beaches of Southern California. Only Eric, the oldest Aerie sibling, flourishes, breezing through medical school and establishing a successful, lucrative practice as a brain surgeon.

As the novel begins, life in the Aerie family has just taken another turn for the worse. Hannah, the mother, has begun to experience symptoms -- possibly psychosomatic -- of deteriorating vision. At first, she sees ghostly double images of everything. Eventually, the world becomes a blur, and all she can see with any clarity is another kind of ghost: Fiona, whose image takes up residence in the Aerie household. At about this time, Pilot, rescued by Eric from the beaches of California, returns to his childhood home and suffers a full-blown psychotic episode. He wanders into the woods behind his home and spends three days in a state of complete catatonia, after which he is formally diagnosed as schizophrenic, and placed in the care of a clinical psychologist named Katherine De Quincy-Joy.

Pilot emerges from this psychotic interlude convinced that Eric, for unknown reasons, murdered Fiona and hid her body. Pilot also believes he has proof of Eric's guilt: a child's sneaker and a bloody knife he claims to have found beneath Eric's bed on the morning after Fiona's disappearance. But Pilot, who is obviously delusional, can't remember where he stashed the evidence. And neither he nor the reader can be absolutely certain that his disordered memories are real.

Uncertainty is, in fact, the animating principle of this novel. Everything that happens in Raveling -- everything we see, hear, and think we understand -- is filtered through the clouded perspective of Pilot Aerie, the quintessential unreliable narrator. Is Eric Aerie really a killer, or is he a misunderstood savior? Is Pilot really a bone-fide schizophrenic, or is he the victim of an artificial, drug-induced psychosis? Could Pilot himself have murdered Fiona in a forgotten moment of psychotic rage? These are among the many questions that dominate the novel, and Smith withholds the answers until the very end, leading us through his dense, carefully constructed narrative maze with the ease and assurance of a natural-born novelist.

By any reasonable standards, Raveling is a remarkable debut, an intelligent, original creation that is alternately moving and suspenseful, disorienting and illuminating. With exquisite deliberation, Smith unearths the buried fragments of an excruciating domestic tragedy. At the same time, he shows us how the world looks from the constantly shifting perspective of a damaged young man struggling to achieve clarity, closure, and a lost sense of coherence. All in all, it's an impressive performance, and announces the arrival of a gifted new novelist who takes large risks and offers equally large rewards. Raveling is the real thing, and I urge you to give it a try. This one is simply too good to pass by.

--Bill Sheehan

FROM THE CRITICS

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

When the sister of James Airie, a diagnosed schizophrenic, disappears, his family unravels. Now, twenty years later, he's ready to "ravel everything back." Some readers found it "tense, engaging, and suspenseful - an extraordinary read." "I was entangled until the end." "A fascinating combination of mystery and family drama." "I read the last 100 pages in one sitting and switched on my answering machine. You'll want to read it undisturbed." A few found it "too quirky and contrived."

Publishers Weekly

This first novel depends a great deal on gimmicks. The hero, from whose disturbed point of view much of the story is told, is the oddly named Pilot Airie (his father was an airline pilot). Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, his life has been off the rails ever since his younger sister, Fiona, disappeared mysteriously during a drunken party his parents threw during his childhood. His older brother, Eric, is a cool, collected neurosurgeon; his mother is a quondam medical specialist, whose eyesight seems to be unaccountably vanishing and whose mental state is increasingly disoriented. The overriding question, to which an attractive young psychotherapist, the elaborately named Katherine Jane De Quincey-Joy, must address herself, as she treats Pilot and begins an affair with Eric, is: whatever happened to Fiona 20 years ago, and can she do anything about it? The problem with much of this fitfully gripping, but just as often irritating, book is that much of the action is seen through Pilot's eyes, and he is a notoriously unreliable witness; he also appears to be omnipresent and all-knowing, which makes him a convenient substitute for the author. There is some vivid writing, and a certain eerie atmosphere is created around this weird family. But Moore Smith seems so intent on tricking the reader--innumerable red herrings are cast before us as to the real guilt in Fiona's disappearance--that one tends to lose patience with the whole proceeding. When even the dead Fiona is granted a narrative voice, briefly, about her grisly demise, it seems that authorial license has overrun the mark. Moore Smith has talent--his evocation of the trauma created over the years by Fiona's fate is telling--but his book is too disorganized and ill-focused to be an effective thriller, and too determined to provide some lurid chills to be the imaginative literary fiction it aspires to. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Though revolving around the 20-year-old unsolved disappearance of a young girl, Smith's exceptional first novel is foremost a tale of family. Since his sister's vanishing, diagnosed schizophrenic Pilot Airie has had plenty of time to question his sanity and wonder if he truly recalls what happened on the evening of her disappearance. With the help of Katherine, the psychologist appointed to help him after a recent episode, Pilot attempts to remember that fateful night to begin his own healing process. While Pilot's account is the centerpiece of the story, each member of his family must undergo a catharsis: the control-freak brother, the mother who can't accept the breakup of her family, and the distant father who can't stop blaming himself for his daughter's disappearance. This wonderfully simple, engaging, and well-written story deserves a spot in public library fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/00.]--Craig Shufelt, Gladwin Cty. Lib., MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

AudioFile - AudioFile Review

With its opening lines, listeners will know this is no ordinary mystery. Pilot James Airie, a diagnosed schizophrenic named after his father's career as an airline pilot, decides to take it upon himself to put the family back together twenty years after the disappearance of his sister. Eric Stoltz lends to this audiobook the vocal finesse of a surgeon, injecting the slightest amount of color into each character, making them each stand out as individuals in their pain, denial, and eventual acceptance of their lives. Listeners will be taken by surprise with this dark and intricately woven tale of a family's journey toward wholeness. R.A.P. ￯﾿ﾽ AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

Read by Eric Stoltz

Vanessa V. Friedman - Entertainment Weekly