The Evidence Against Her A Novel

Robb Forman Dew reaches far in her fourth novel, The Evidence Against Her. She wants to paint a portrait--at once intimate and sweeping--of a small, turn-of-the-century town. Into the upper crust of Washburn, Ohio, three babies are born on the same sunny day in 1888. Robert, Lily, and Warren grow up as a triumvirate, though their parents are vaguely disturbed by their "threesomeness." Eventually, as seems preordained, Robert and Lily are married, and Warren, left behind, falls for and weds the teenage Agnes. The introduction of Agnes, the interloper, upsets the triangle in unexpected ways. Forman Dew writes of these emotional entanglements in a lush, descriptive prose that owes a lot to the quiet romanticism of Eudora Welty. She wants us to believe in the intense inner lives of these old-fashioned characters;it's as if she's showing us a faded black-and-white daguerreotype and demanding that we imagine ourselves in the high-buttoned shoes of the people we see in the picture.--Claire Dederer

Robb Forman Dew was born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For the past thirty years she has lived in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, who is professor of history at Williams College.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Dew is the author of the novels Dale Loves Sophie to Death, for which she received the National Book Award; The Time of Her Life; Fortunate Lives; The Evidence Against Her; and, most recently, The Truth of the Matter; as well as a memoir, The Family Heart.