There are usually 336 dimples on a golf ball, and a golf ball weighs about 1.6 ounces. The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian opens with those facts, then a short lecture on which balls have historically killed people, before arriving at a country club fifteen miles north of New York City in August 1978, where an eighteen-year-old is practising her drives into a net with a hole in it. Fifteen yards away, a caddy named Kenny Foster looks up when the caddy master calls his name. The voice telling you all this waits until the end of the chapter to identify itself: “I know because I was the girl who hit the golf ball.”
A Memoir, Written Forty-Eight Years Late
Mira Winston is sixty-six when she writes this. She is a novelist with twenty-five books behind her, and the thing she is most often introduced as is the girl who killed a boy at a country club. The book is her account of the two years that followed, and Bohjalian commits to the form completely: chapter titles that read like essay prompts, direct address to the reader, a narrator who interrupts herself to insist she is trustworthy. “I am reliable as fuck,” she tells us early, pre-empting the book club that would like to argue otherwise.
What makes it work is that Mira is far harder on herself than the state ever manages to be. Since she was fifteen she has been sleeping with Theo Catton, a married management consultant of forty-seven who plays golf with her father. She has convinced herself that the two facts are one fact: that Kenny died because she went to hotels with a grown man, and that the arithmetic of the universe simply came due that Thursday. She calls this place in her head Mira Land, and The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian is fundamentally the story of a woman spending fifty years trying to talk herself out of it.
The Real Subject Is Who Gets to Be Careless
The novel is very good on golf and much better on class. The caddies are not allowed in the pool, the dining room or the good bathroom; they use the one off the kitchen with the cooks and the cleaners. The practice net faces directly at the pergola where they wait for work, and nobody has ever thought about that, least of all Mira. There is a four-letter abbreviation the women at the club use, NOCD, which stands for “not our class, dear.”
When the prosecution builds its case, this is the case: a spoiled rich girl who wanted something removed, got her way, and killed a striver. The district attorney selects jurors by income. The defence does the same in the other direction. Bohjalian lets the reader see that almost everything the state says about Mira is true, apart from the one detail on which the charge depends, and that discomfort is the most interesting thing in the book.
The Theo strand is handled with real nerve. Mira refuses the clean retrospective verdict, admitting that some days she classes him as merely exploitative rather than a predator, then dismantling her own position a paragraph later. The book never lectures. It just waits, patiently, for a scene forty years on in a Florida hallway, where the whole argument resolves into a single word.
What Works
Four things make The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian worth the hardback.
- The voice. Caustic, digressive, funny, and merciless about its own younger self. Mira is one of the most fully inhabited narrators Bohjalian has written.
- The legal machinery. Depositions, the four elements of a negligence claim, an engineer explaining the case through the stitching on a suit pocket. It is procedurally convincing without ever becoming a textbook.
- Ethan Pomerleau. A Vietnam veteran starting college at twenty-nine, and the one man in the novel who declines what is offered to him. The restraint with which Bohjalian handles him is the book’s quiet moral centre.
- The epilogue. Two hundred words, and they reorganise everything you have just read.
Where It Stumbles
Four things keep The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian off the top of his backlist.
- The memoir frame licenses too much. Excursions on Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hours, a pandemic voice injury, Stormy Daniels, an irritating book group. Individually diverting, cumulatively a drag on a book that is already telling you where it ends.
- The reader gets addressed too often. “Pretend you’re back in high school and it’s an essay question.” Charming twice, a tic by the fifteenth time.
- The central question resolves by outburst. Who cut the target off the net is answered when someone stands up in court and says so. It is emotionally earned and structurally cheap.
- Harry Fallows is a mechanism. The club pro exists to be gutless, and the novel never gives him the interiority it gives everyone else.
Content, and Who This Is For
A Word on Content Warnings
Substantial. A three-year sexual relationship between a fifteen-year-old and a man of forty-seven, described frankly and at length. An attempted rape. Sustained suicidal ideation and one attempt rendered in close detail. The accidental death of a teenager, with autopsy testimony and forensic photographs. Heavy drug use, parental alcoholism, and the slut-shaming of a teenage girl by adults and peers alike. Readers affected by any of this can find support through the Samaritans.
Who Should Read The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian
Reach for it if you want a courtroom novel where the verdict matters less than the class argument underneath it, if you like narrators who prosecute themselves harder than the state does, or if the phrase freak accident has ever felt like an insult. Skip it if you need a tight thriller, or if a novel that tells you the ending on page ten will frustrate you.
What to Read After The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian
- The Jackal’s Mistress by Chris Bohjalian. His previous novel, and the natural next step for the same interest in a woman making an unforgivable choice under pressure.
- I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. The closest comparison on our shelves: a death at a privileged school, revisited decades later by a woman implicated in it.
- Courtroom Drama by Neely Tubati Alexander. A far lighter book, for readers who find they like the jury-box machinery most.
- Midwives by Chris Bohjalian. His breakout, and the earlier version of this exact shape: an accidental death, a trial, a community deciding what it wants to believe.
- Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller. For the same cold intelligence about an older adult, a much younger person, and the stories both tell themselves.
The Last Word on The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian
The title is doing more work than it looks. Mira is an amateur golfer, good enough to beat every man at the club and not good enough for the tour, and she says plainly that she was the ultimate amateur: someone who tried to play above her game and flew too close to the sun. But it also describes a girl of fifteen out of her depth with a man three times her age, and a country club that bought a net meant for a back garden and hung it facing the help. Everybody in this novel is playing a game they have not earned the right to play, and the person who pays is a seventeen-year-old boy who walked to work and read books between rounds. Bohjalian has written twenty-six books. This one knows exactly where the ball went, and it spends four hundred pages refusing to let anyone call it bad luck.
