Family Matters

AND SOMETIMES WHY

By Rebecca Johnson

Putnam. 303 pp. 24.95

In her first novel, And Sometimes Why, Rebecca Johnson has managed to do an unlikely thing: deliver a perfectly pleasant, even enjoyable, read about a sad subject: the tragic accident of a lovely 16-year-old girl.

Readers hurrying away from such a depressing premise should be reassured. And Sometimes Why will not be painful to read, and it will not leave you devastated. It is smart, sharply observant, even gently funny, but it is interested in our haplessness as much as our grief, in our survival rather than our undoing.

Happily married Sophia and Darius McMartin have two daughters, Helen and Miranda. The novel opens on a scene of relative domestic tranquility in the family's Los Angeles home, with the two teenagers squabbling at the breakfast table over who gets the car that day. Hours later, the ties that bind this nice family fly apart when 16-year-old Helen is critically injured in a motorcycle accident.

Johnson's gift is to show us exactly how it feels to be the mother of a beautiful young girl who lies in a coma -- "She felt dizzy, as if the blood in her body were suddenly flowing in the wrong direction, the way the ocean is said to recede before a tsunami" -- or the sister who struggles wretchedly with her guilt for surviving. Johnson's prose is wonderful at these points, delivering the full force of felt experience.

After Helen's accident, the McMartins are in the first circle of hell, but they have company, including the empty-headed Harry Harlow, host of a popular TV game show called "Would You Rather?" in which contestants have their choice of various traumatizing fates (eat worms, sit down in a tank full of rats, etc.). Harry was driving the car in the accident that injured Helen, and though he is not to blame, the encounter sets his life on a perilously wobbly course.

Except his peril is not real peril; it's almost like slapstick, and Johnson adopts a light tone in Harry's chapters, bordering on comic. The publicity following the accident hurts the show, and Harry gets canned. His doll-baby wife leaves him, but he doesn't really care, because she's insufferably shallow, too. He forms an absurd business partnership with the guy who comes to clean the pool. Harry is a loser trapped in a successful man's life, but Johnson makes him a figure of gentle fun rather than a victim of tragedy.

Comic touches and happy endings are risky for a novelist whose opening salvo is to incapacitate a teenage girl. Certainly there can be humor in sad stories -- John Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea is a beautiful example -- and most tragedy is improved by comedy. But great weight must counteract such moments of lightness, or else we're left with a lightweight story, rather than a solid story shot through with light. And Sometimes Why is not quite heavy enough, perhaps, but it is a deft and often winning beginning for this novelist.

--Carrie Brown's most recent novel is "The Rope Walk."