Where Love Has Gone
Good Fit
- Readers of Harold Robbins's 1960s novels about family, money and sexual politics
- Anyone interested in dramas built around a juvenile court, psychological assessment and a family secret
- Those curious about how a strong, manipulative mother shapes her daughter
Not a Fit
- Readers who cannot tolerate a description of a child's sexual relationship with an adult man: it is the book's central theme and is shown in one scene
- Those who tire of period novels full of violence, alcoholism and demeaning remarks about women
- Anyone looking for a modern, sensitive treatment of trauma
The novel begins in the first person. The narrator is Luke Carey: this morning he was dismissed from his job, in the afternoon he watched baseball on television, and at night he is looking at the ceiling in bed. His pregnant wife Elizabeth is beside him, two weeks from delivery. In the night the phone rings: from San Francisco the police deputy chief Joe Flynn says his fourteen-year-old daughter Danielle has killed a man.
The dead man is Tony Ricco, the lover of Luke's former wife, the famous sculptor Nora Hayden. The officer describes the crime thus: the girl took a sculptor's tool from her mother's studio and drove it into the man's belly; the room is covered in blood. By the police theory the event happened out of jealousy, because Ricco was involved with both the girl and her mother. Luke disagrees: he has not seen his daughter for more than six years, but he knows her.
At midnight Elizabeth makes him coffee and says he must go to his daughter. Luke refuses: he has just lost his job, the family has one hundred and sixty dollars in the bank, and the cost of the birth lies ahead. Elizabeth insists: «If Danielle were my own daughter I'd say the same to you». She knows her husband has carried the pain of losing his daughter in his heart for years.
Danielle's lawyer is Harris Gordon: San Francisco's best and most expensive lawyer, who also took Nora's side in the old divorce case. Nora herself is having a breakdown. The grandmother, Mrs Hayden, phones Luke and offers a hotel; Luke proudly refuses. Gordon gives him a firm instruction: say nothing to the press before speaking to me.
In this part the author draws a portrait of Nora Hayden: of Spanish nobility, carrying Irish railwayman's and English banker's blood, a creative and destructive force. A stone, metal or wood she touches gains a new life, but a living thing in her hands perishes. Luke says: «I am the living proof of this».
- Chapters from several viewpoints (Luke, Nora, Dani, the probation officer) show how the characters see one another
- The court scenes and interrogations are the book's strongest and tensest part
- The conversations between Dani and the psychiatrist are psychologically convincing
- The flashbacks (1943–1951) evoke the period well but slow the plot
- Several women characters (Nora, Cecelia, Violet) are types and somewhat caricatured
On the destructive bond between mother and daughter and a family tragedy
Sexual secrets, family hypocrisy and a trial in 1950s America
A crime and a family secret opened in the courtroom
On the way Luke recalls the court hearing of eleven years ago. An agreement had been reached with Nora on the divorce and the girl's care; Danielle would spend twelve weekends a year and half the summer with her father. But in the courtroom Harris Gordon suddenly says: Luke has no right over Danielle, because his wife became pregnant six or seven weeks before Luke returned from Japan. Nora calls her daughter «not her husband's but another man's». Luke is stunned, and standing with the girl's ball in his hand he understands that Nora does not want to share her own «work» with anyone.
The years that follow: Luke lets out his small boat at La Jolla and gets permission to see Danielle only once a month. Five years later, one day a blonde girl, Elizabeth Andersen, comes to his boat: she wants a charter for her seventy-one-year-old employer. Luke looks at her like a «goddess»; they marry. Elizabeth tonight calls him «daddy» for the first time and insists he set off.
The same day Luke has lost his job at the construction firm: the boss Sam Brady says the lending company is sending its own man. After work he goes to a bar and watches baseball, and when he returns home Elizabeth says nothing, only «go and wash your face». So Luke flies by night to San Francisco, towards his past.
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