Savage Grace by Natalie Robins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The two authors combine the approaches of an oral hisotry, delivered in paragraph-length quotations and excerpts with a mixed timeline. (The murder and incareration is described intermingled with the events leading up to it, including multiple generations of family history.) The result makes me feel that we are not read a book, but the notes that could have resulted in a very good book. Tony Baekeland is for removed from the inventory of plastics in time that it seems a mere distraction or subject for a different book to explore that as much as is done here.
All that aside, this is not so much as a true crime narrative, but a multi-faceted recollection of Tony Baekeland, an heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, whose greatest hurdles in life come not from the want, but from an incestuous power struggle withhis mother Barbara while absent an engaged father (Brooks Baekeland). Struggling with his homosexuality without family support and desperate for individuation yet lacking the will to leave the stifling fold, Tony goes down the road to matricide, a knife assault on his grandmother after beaureaucratic inefficiency leads to his release and, finally, an ironic if possibly dubious suicide by plastic bag.
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