fiction

Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick

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While I love a realist novel that pulls me right into someone else’s life, like Stoner by John Williams or Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, I also like to be surprised and challenged sometimes.

Here a woman named Elizabeth, in a story written by an Elizabeth, summons her past: “If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. . . Perhaps.” What arrives is a kaleidoscope of people she’s known, places she’s lived, literary references, letters, brief essays: vignettes presented in prose as concise and brilliant as poetry, connected by threads so fine as to be invisible.

Elizabeth writes about her mother: “I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was.” She writes about friends, such as Alex who has never quite fulfilled his promise—“Not quite liking himself, he whom everyone adores”—or Louisa who “spends the entire day in a blue, limpid boredom. The caressing sting of it appears to be, for her, like the pleasure of lemon, or the coldness of salt water.” And Billie Holliday with her “ruthless talent and the opulent devastation.”

I was most interested in the parts about two women who once worked for her: Ida when Elizabeth lived in Maine, and Josette when she lived in Boston, summoning the shape of their lives in spare sentences. Josette, who “in her passionate neatness, adored small spaces” finds her dream home in a trailer. In Maine, Ida is the “rough and peculiar laundress” whose “disaster” is the disreputable local man who moves in with her:

Winter came down upon them. The suicide season arrived early. The land, after a snowfall, would turn into a lunar stillness, satanic, brilliant. The tall trees, altered by the snow and ice, loomed up in the arctic landscape like ancient cataclysmic formations of malicious splendor. The little houses on the road . . . trembling there in the whiteness, might be settlements waiting for a doom that would come over them silently in the night.

This passage takes me back to my first winters in New England, fifty years ago now, when winters were more severe. Or at least that’s how I remember them. I have mixed feelings about her portraits of certain women. Anything that reduces individuals to categories rubs me the wrong way, yet the descriptions themselves are piercing.

I like to remember the patience of old spinsters, some that looked like sea captains with their clear blue eyes, hair of soft, snowy whiteness, dazzling cheerfulness. Solitary music teachers, themselves bred on toil, leading the young by way of pain and discipline to their own honorable impasse, teaching in that way the scales of disappointment.

Like Elizabeth, we find roots of our identity in the people we’ve encountered during our lives and in places. She writes of the Kentucky of her childhood and sojourns in Amsterdam. But it is New York City that is most vividly rendered here.

The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café; the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night—working, smiling, in makeup in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again.

Originally published in 1979 as a novel, Hardwick’s plotless book is now considered an early work of what is now called autofiction where the lines between autobiography and fiction are blurred by writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Knausgård and Ben Lerner.

Readers prospecting for details of her life may find fragments in their sieves: “I was then a ‘we.’ He is teasing, smiling, drinking gin after a long, day’s work . . .” The absence of the narcissistic ex-husband who co-opted her life is refreshing.

I mistrust autofiction, though I do recognise that we create our lives and curate our memories of them. I appreciate, particularly in these days of flagrant misinformation, the attempt to tell the truth.

Still, I enjoyed this fragmented chronicle of a life. Partly it’s the writing, and partly it is honoring the collection of seemingly random memories. Many of us, as the decades pile up behind us, look back and try to find coherence in the jumbled chaos of our days. Like Elizabeth we are:

Looking for the fosselized, for something—persons and places thick and encrusted with final shape; instead there are many, many minnows, wildly swimming, trembling, vigilant to escape the net.

Have you read anything by Hardwick, either her essays or novels?

Sweet Days of Discipline, by Fleur Jaeggy

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“At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” Thus begins this short, sharp novel by Jaeggy, an award-winning Swiss author who writes in Italian. Appenzell is a canton in Switzerland.

I thought of other novels I’d read set in boarding schools, but realised this was going to something altogether different when I read the next sentence: “This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college.”

Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer, an early Modernist admired by Kafka and Hesse, whose plotless stories convey the somber gravity of life. In one story he says, “Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”

Our narrator is enclosed by the strictures of boarding school life, having been in one or another since she was eight and her grandmother sent her away for being too wild, too savage. Her parents are separated, her mother in Brazil writes only to the headmistress giving orders such as that she is to have a German roommate. Her father, cold & distant, lives in hotel rooms, visiting her rarely.

This unwanted girl becomes fascinated by a new student: the silent and aloof Frédérique. She mounts a campaign to “conquer” Frédérique and force her into friendship. The violence of the narrator’s feelings contrasts with the strict controls imposed by the school—“Obedience and discipline set the tempo at the Bausler Institut”—and with Frédérique’s own outsized love of order.

As part of her campaign, the narrator pretends to be interested in Expressionist art and French literature, but confides to us “I postponed any serious thinking until I was out in the world.” This was exactly what a woman told me in a class I taught in a prison. It made sense to me then and makes sense to me now reading about this young woman who is desperate to break free and live her own life.

You must always say thank you, even when they have refused you something. Part of your education is learning how to thank with a smile. An awful smile. There is a mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique, In the one the girl runs about and laughs, and in the other she lies on a bed covered by a lace shroud. It’s her own skin has embroidered it.

The style of the book challenges today’s common writing advice to write in scenes, to show not tell. There are no scenes here, yet the narrator’s telling is irresistible. It is her voice, her feelings, and her judgments that carry the story.

The narrator’s ferocity and emotional swings can be unnerving, such as one minute wanting to literally strangle her roommate and the next laughing with her in their shared washroom. The austere beauty of the prose and the free association of the narrator’s thoughts make this a startling read.

Can you recommend a novel by a Swiss author?

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason

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Having found Mason’s novel The Winter Soldier a rich experience, I picked up this collection of short stories. I was surprised to find that I had already read one of them in The Atlantic and thought it brilliant.

“For the Union Dead” begins with the narrator being asked to sort through the belongings of his recently deceased uncle, a nan he didn’t know well. “He was a quiet figure, my father’s only brother, and overshadowed by my mother’s sprawling clan of six siblings.” The narrator does know that Teddy was peculiar: an unmarried man who wore suspenders, drank borscht every morning, and kept the tv tuned to pro wrestling. We learn more about Teddy’s background, his growing interest in Civil War reenactment, and the strange way he chose to participate in it. All add up to an unforgettable portrait of man and the weight of history.

The other stories are about equally peculiar people. Set in earlier ages, each delves into a person who is, well, different. From naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace collecting new species in the Malay Archipelago to a female aéronaute piloting a balloon into eternity, their voices invite us to share their experience as they launch themselves outside society’s straitjacket.

I particularly liked “The Line Agent Pascal” which begins “Every morning Hippolyte Pascal, agent of the Line at Urupá, woke to the sun and the sound of parrots, rose from his hammock, dressed, set a battered kettle on the fire, and crossed his tiny station to check the signal.”

Writers are often advised to leave out routine actions for fear of boring the reader. Yet this first sentence not only grounds the reader in time and place, but also conveys his solitude. It is a time when the telegraph was necessary to connect the town and the distant mines, when the technology was primitive enough to require signal boosters at intervals along the line. But it is his solitude that is the core of the story, the eternal balancing act between solitude and society.

The title story takes us into one of the farthest of society’s outliers: Arthur Bispo de Rosário who calls himself a sailor and “a collector of lives.” What today we would call an outsider artist, he speaks to us from the Brazilian psychiatric institution, his home for fifty years, where a doctor draws details of his life from him. Interspersed in the narrative are Arthur’s descriptions of his elaborate embroideries, part of his “divine mission.“ Mason draws on his own work as a psychiatrist to take us into the mind of this actual person, diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose name now adorns Rio de Janeiro’s Contemporary Art Museum.

The real question in these stories is: What does it feel like to be inside this person’s head? How do they perceive and interpret the world?

And this is the great gift of fiction: to be able to see the world through the eyes of another.

Yes, like many readers, I sometimes dive into a novel to escape from our humdrum or terrifying present into a pleasant dream of a world. Even in the most lightweight novels, though, we are asked to experience the events along with the protagonist. Every time we do that, we increase our capacity for empathy.

Some stories stay with us for years. What is one that has stayed with you?

Darling Girl, by Liz Michalski

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Subtitled A Novel of Peter Pan, this dark tale is not a retelling of the J. M. Barrie classic, but rather a story inspired by it. Holly Darling, granddaughter of Wendy, has come through great trauma to finally arrive at a good place. She lost her beloved husband and one of her twin sons in a terrible car accident, leaving her with a limp and her other son Jack with terrible wounds. Her daughter Eden, born after the accident, has been in a coma for years after a fall from a tree.

That’s a lot of tragedy for one woman. On the plus side, she has wealth through her mother Jane, and Holly herself has started a skincare business that has taken off. Jack has made a miraculous recovery, and Holly is able to use her lab at the business to continue researching a cure for Eden.

Then Eden disappears. Holly is convinced that the only one who could have taken her is Peter.

The family doesn’t talk about the whole Peter Pan thing. Wendy is a beloved memory; the emotionally distant Jane is fascinated by Peter, but also resents the fact that he never took her to Neverland. Yes, there is magic in this story, simply there, something that is part of the Darling family’s world. For Holly, “Maybe the line between the real world and the magical one isn’t quite as solid as she thinks.”

One of the things that brings this book into today’s world is its depiction of the terrible cost of celebrity. With the enduring popularity of Barrie’s book, the Darling family is hounded by stalkers and wannabes, while being fearful of ending up in the news for any reason. By lending her name to her company, Holly has taken a big risk, emotionally.

I took a risk as well, reading this book. Peter Pan is one of my favorite stories, ever since seeing Mary Martin fly across the stage of the Lyric Theatre. Was it really Mary Martin? I’m not sure, but that’s how I remember it. That experience launched me into wanting to become an actress.

It took 15 years for me to learn that acting wasn’t for me; childhood’s dreams don’t always work for adults. Meanwhile Peter’s story became a shifting metaphor for so many things in my life: the yearning for adventure, even dangerous adventures; the idea that wonderful things can come into your life, unexpected and unearned; the recognition that certain people never grow up and others are obsessed with crowing about themselves. I’m often reminded of Wendy’s line after she sews on his shadow: “Of course, I did nothing!”

Michalski’s story is so dark that at times I thought I must be crazy to risk this radically different interpretation of Peter, Tinkerbell, Hook, et al. But I have always been aware of the darkness in Barrie’s story: a charismatic leader who creates a cult-like following eager to agree with him; a father who is also a cruel pirate who flirts with Wendy; Wendy herself as the only one who is eager to grow up, pretending to be a mother to Peter and the lost boys, like women everywhere who take up the slack when men absent themselves.

The problems in Barrie’s tale have been brought home to me more recently in sharing the story with my grandchildren through Cathy Rigby’s film. It has prompted discussions of indigenous people and pirates, gender roles and personal space, lost children and parents, crocodiles and alarm clocks. We act out the parts we love: making Wendy houses, playing Hook and croc chase games, pretending to fly.

It’s as a parent that I appreciate the truth in the themes Michalski draws from the original story to explore here. Teenaged Jack is trying to pull away from Holly’s control, not understanding her reasons for putting limitations on him. Both Wendy and Jane have kept up the fiction that Peter Pan and Neverland are fun and innocent and lovely, leaving Holly vulnerable to Peter’s pixie dust. Not hearing the truth from her mother and grandmother, Holly is a “motherless daughter” as Adrienne Rich described in her essay “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.”

The themes from Barrie’s original story around loss of innocence, aging, and leaving home/parents play out differently here. Our heroes aren’t always who we expect them to be. A couple of Michalski’s darker interpretations are ones that I’ve considered for years.

These days I think more about Wendy’s mother in the original story, losing her daughter to a charming man, a man without a shadow. I wonder about mother and daughter’s relationship after Wendy returns from Neverland, still charmed and eager to return to help with Peter’s spring cleaning. As a parent, I accept the lesson Holly struggles with: “I learned long ago that if you wish to keep your loved ones close, you need to let them leave.” At the same time, I would do anything—really, anything—for my children. Michalski’s story asks how much we will give of ourselves to protect those we love.

Poet Stevie Smith said, “we must put away the beautiful fairy stories / And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment.” Michalski’s book is anything but dull; I couldn’t stop reading. It is a book for adults, for those of us who have learned to be wary of enchantment and to treasure the truth.

What modern interpretation of a fairy tale have you read?

The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See

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The island is Jeju, off the South Korean coast. The sea women are the Haenyos, women who don’t use breathing equipment but rather hold their breath to dive to the sea floor to harvest seafood.

The story opens with Young-sook, an elderly retired Haenyo who hates being treated as a tourist attraction. She is especially peeved by the persistence of an American woman and her daughter who claim to be descended from Young-sook’s best friend Mi-ja. They show Young-sook a photograph which she pretends not to recognise.

We are then transported back to 1938. As the daughter of the chief of a Haenyo collective, Young-sook trains from a young age, both to learn the breathing technique called “Sumbisori” and to be in top physical condition. Since the women are the ones who earn money, men on the island stay home to care for the children. Meanwhile, the island is suffering under Japanese rule.

We follow Young-sook as she meets and befriends Mi-ja, who is an outcast because her parents collaborated the Japanese. The girls eventually begin training to become Haenyos, starting out as “baby divers” and gradually becoming more proficient. They work as a team farming the wet fields (the sea) and the dry fields (the vegetable garden). Much as Young-sook loves being in the sea, she can never forget the danger involved, repeating the mantra “Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life.”

The situation worsens during World War II, as the Japanese impress young men from the island into their army and send refugees to the island, where there is already too little food. The end of the war brings a new nightmare, as the Americans install a dictator in South Korea and help his forces further tyrannize the island. The carnages on top of the great poverty on the island makes for difficult reading at some points.

The two girls find themselves at odds as they enter arranged marriages. The progress and zig-zags of their friendship are one of the best things in the story, beautifully rendered. The story occasionally flashes forward to 2008, when the Americans continue to pester the elderly Young-sook, wanting to tell her about Mi-ja’s fate.

The details of the culture on the island, the history of the people there, and most of all the immersive experience of diving with the Haenyos are what make the story memorable. Meticulously researched, with additional information on the author’s website, we are privileged to learn about a way of life that has now almost disappeared.

Perhaps the hardest task for a novelist is inserting a trail of breadcrumbs such that the ending comes as a surprise, yet perfectly obvious looking back over the story. What makes it hard is the range of readers: I know from my book clubs that some people catch on right away, while others may still need an explanation even after finishing a book.

For me, with this book, I saw the answers to the story questions too early and wondered through much of the book why the characters were not able to see them as well. Still, though the story of the friendship sagged a little, for me at least, the story of the sea women and their island did not. I strongly recommend this book.

Have you ever heard of the Haenyos?

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

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This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world.

She and her father, stepmother and young siblings live in a gated community ten miles outside Los Angeles. It is not just gated but fortified against the collapsing society outside, where dire poverty is rampant, services have mostly collapsed, and police and firefighters cannot be trusted. Gangs run amok, many high on a drug that makes them delight in setting fires and killing people.

Lauren comes to the conclusion that society will fail even further and their frail walls will not be able to keep out the mobs who want even the small affluence they have: vegetable gardens, acorns they’ve collected for flour, a sewing machine. She begins to train herself in how to survive, everything from recognising edible wild plants to firing a gun. But her “sharing” means that it is easy to incapacitate her, simply by hurting someone in front of her.

She creates her own belief system, which she calls Earthseed, based on the idea that the only reliable truth is that “God is Change.” Given that, then humanity can shape God. All of her preparations are needed when their fortifications are breached three years later, and she sets out to find a place to regroup and recreate a community.

At first I found this book almost impossible to read. Not because of anything wrong with the book, but because of my own despair. Such a future seems only too likely, maybe not in the next two years, but not that far off. Too many groups today are threatening civil war, and boasting that they are the ones with guns.

Then I remembered the early 1970s. Society seemed to be falling apart in the wake of assassinations, corruption, the Vietnam debacle. My partner pointed out the fragility of supply chains—something the pandemic has brought home to all of us fifty years later. Like many of those who jumped on the back-to-the-land movement at the time, he was motivated less by a desire to be closer to nature and more by wanting to be self-sufficient if—when—the social order imploded.

It didn’t. The country pulled through, damaged and deeply flawed, but holding.

This book felt so real to me, as though it were all happening right now. Just as I despaired in the beginning, I began to hope as Lauren built her community, one person at a time, one kindness at a time.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

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Most synopses of this book ignore the prologue, which started as a short story and was added here at the beginning of this first book in Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series. Yet this was the part that grabbed my attention, centering as it does on a young woman in a world that seems similar to England in the late Middle Ages, though with some differences.

It’s Egwene’s first day being allowed to work as a water carrier during the annual sheep shearing in Emond’s Field, a town in the Two Rivers district. However, her ambition to be the best water carrier ever is derailed by her desire to see what the three young men—Rand, Mat and Perrin—are up to. The town has a mayor, who also owns the pub, but it is the Wisdom, an elderly woman, who holds the power. There are subtle signs that something is threatening this world.

As we move into the story proper, two strangers come to Emond’s Field: the mysterious Moiraine and her warder Lan. Gleeman Thom Merrilyn also turns up to entertain the town during the Winternight celebration with songs, stories, and juggling. When the town is attacked by Trollocs—creatures believed to only exist in legends—Moiraine leads the four young people and Thom on a quest to find out why their town was attacked and prevent future invasions.

While I love that women have the power in this world, what makes the story work is how each character is brought to life as their lives change and they are invited to become more than they ever thought they could be. Their individuality and the realistic character development kept me reading to find out what would happen to them.

A friend recommended the series, surprised that I’d never heard of it. There are fourteen books in the series, the last three of which were completed by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death. Since each book is over 800 pages long, the series is a huge commitment.

The amount of detail Jordan has infused into this world is stunning. The world began when the Creator set a wheel in motion, such that the pattern of its seven ages repeat, but the intervals are so long, that people forget what’s happened before.

In addition to the theme of time being cyclical is the theme of how best to use power. The One Power which turns the wheel is divided into male and female halves, saidin and saidar. Unfortunately, history has shown that men who try to channel the One Power go mad and destroy everything, so now only women wield that power.

During creation the Creator imprisoned “Shai’tan,” the Dark One, but at various times his influence has escaped, so that his followers—Trollocs, Myrddraals and others—now fight to free him to take over the world.

Among many things I admire in this book is the language, particularly in dialogue. Jordan has found a way to suggest an older time without belaboring the reader with archaic diction. I need to study more carefully how he’s accomplished this, but one way is by occasionally using an obsolete word, such as scullion, while retaining the flow of our current speech patterns.

Another thing I admire is Jordan’s inventiveness, both with the detailed legends and with the dangers our protagonists encounter. Even more, I love the possibilities that open before them. And for once, the ending is perfect. I won’t give it away, but it is a model for how to handle the climax of a quest effectively, one way at least. And there are maps!

Will I read more? I don’t know if I have the stomach for fourteen books, but I may read a few more. There’s this one character I’d like to know more about.

Have you read The Wheel of Time series? What is your favorite fantasy novel?

Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Subtitled A Novel, this book is a collection of short vignettes by an unnamed narrator, each named by where it takes place: “On the Sidewalk,” “In the Office,” etc. A picture gradually emerges of a 45-year-old woman in an unnamed Italian town whose “heart” is not really in her new teaching job, a woman who says, “Solitude: It’s become my trade.”

She seems very alone. Her colleagues keep to themselves. She has a few friends, one a married man with whom she might have once been involved with. This is just the kind of liminal relationship that interests me, but Lahiri doesn’t follow up with it, though the narrator runs into him and his wife a few times.

Some of the fragments have to do with the narrator’s parents. Her now-deceased father is remembered fondly despite his penny-pinching ways, but her relationship with her mother is strained. In one piece where Lahiri’s glorious use of language peeps out, the narrator says her mother always kept her close: “She protected me from solitude as if it were a nightmare.” Even now, her mother wants to recreate that bond, “blind to the small pleasures” of her daughter’s solitude.

Overall, though, the prose seems to me more pedestrian than I would have expected of this author whose other books have astounded me. The plot, too, is obscure: brief, seemingly unconnected incidents recounted by a person so reticent she can only share the barest details.

I suspect these limitations come from Lahiri having written the book in Italian, a recent language for her. Working myself on learning that language, I’m in awe at her accomplishment with this, her third language.

I’ve also tried writing in Italian and translating English into that language, and failed. I can use a dictionary as well as the next person, but I don’t know the connotations that have accrued to words, the cultural references evoked by certain phrases, the slang. It’s too easy to use a word innocently, not knowing what it conjures up for a native speaker.

My only recourse has been to write very simply, using basic vocabulary. I wonder if that isn’t what the author has chosen to do here. My own failures make me even more appreciative of the moments when her language sings, such as when she says of a father and daughter who run a trattoria that, coming originally from an island, they have “stored the sun in their bones.”

The lack of names—was the island Capri, Sardinia, Lampedusa?—adds to the disconnected feel of the book. The little vignettes are like leaves floating in a pond, sometimes touching briefly before slipping apart. The challenge is to make these seemingly random pieces hold the reader’s interest.

I love the concept of locating each piece so precisely—“At the Ticket Counter,” “On the Balcony”—while withholding any identifier that would anchor them in our world. Although I miss Lahiri’s beautiful language, I love the way the style she’s chosen for this novel reflects the narrator’s self-sufficiency. Other reviews mention the narrator’s loneliness, but I see her as positive about the solitude she has chosen. Yes, she has casual encounters and a few relaxed friendships, but prefers to walk the world alone. She betrays no angst and no regrets about her choice.

The fragmentary form of the book reflects what our lives are actually like. One of the greatest challenges of writing memoir is finding a narrative arc in our messy lives. In this novel, Lahiri has chosen to present a messy life without a narrative arc. It is an experiment in form and language that leaves me with the haunting portrait of a fictional woman I wish I knew more about.

Have you read any of Jhumpa Lahiri’s books?

Much Ado about Nothing

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I usually review books, not films, but I have to make an exception here. It is rare that a film is so much more than the text, and here is a great example. Adapted and directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring himself and Emma Thompson, plus an all-star cast, this is my favorite summer film. It brings Shakespeare’s play to life beyond what you could best imagine.

First off, there’s the beginning. The entire film takes place at a huge villa in Tuscany. The opening scenes—and the transcendent music—evoke the peace and beauty of rural life and the excitement of the men returning from the battlefield.

This is catnip for anyone who has ever dreamed of renting a villa in Tuscany: vineyarda, women in flowing white dresses picnicking among the olive trees with music and bread and wine. Then come the stirring hero shots of the men galloping along the road. And—balm to my practical soul—everyone bathes and dresses themselves in clean linen to meet, all to the thrilling soundtrack. Such joy!

Of course complications ensue. So does comedy, this being Shakespeare, after all. Brilliantly paced, brilliantly acted.

At no point does Shakespeare’s language seem anything other than utterly normal, thanks to the quality of the cast. I have to single out Denzel Washington whose dialogue seems even more natural, if that’s possible. What a gift, to make this language seem everyday!

Films based on books or plays often cut corners to keep the running time down to the standard limit. Often they choose one theme or story line among many to follow. This is the rare exception where the film exceeds the reading experience.

There is so much joy here, so much celebration of life! Give yourself the gift of streaming this film today. With a hey, nonny, nonny!

Is there a book or play you’ve read where the film is actually better?

Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy

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Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica.

The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. The scientific community believes the Arctic terns are extinct, but Franny does find the last few. However, without fish to eat along the way, the terns might not make it to Antarctica, so she must find a way to follow along with them. She must know if any of them make it safely.

Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat with a curmudgeonly captain and quirky crew. Unable to make a living off the meager fish in the sea and hounded by people onshore who are furious that the fishermen are killing the few remaining fish, the sailors are lured by Franny’s promise of a last big haul. So they set off, using her instruments to follow the terns she banded.

But Franny is more than a loner; she is a leaver. She says:

It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

What and who she has left and why are unclear. Where is the husband she writes to every day? What crime has she committed? Will she find her mother? The tales of her losses begin to unspool in side currents, her dark secrets roiling the story by tossing the reader back and forth in time.

Most of the people in my book club were unsettled by these time shifts and confused by the fragments of several stories that only gradually begin to cohere. The fragmentation, confusion, and dissociation reflect Franny’s state. She, too, is ready to become extinct.

The themes of loss and leaving and migrations are multi-layered, but McConaghy treads lightly. It was only when I finally wrenched myself away from the book at the end that I was able to appreciate how intimately they permeated the story. I also appreciated that, while this future is only to likely to occur and pretty soon, the book is different form other dystopian novels, not frantic or furious. It is a quiet book.

And truly a magnificent one. The writing, the world-building, the offbeat characters, the way McConaghy inspired my immediate allegiance to this damaged woman and her quest: all excellent. My favorite part was when she was on the ship—I so enjoyed the crew members, their community of oddballs and their treatment of Franny.

Because of my outsized love for this story, my disappointment at the end was also outsized. As we drew closer, I wondered how the author would wrap it up. Since I had sometimes wondered if Franny was an unreliable narrator, I was even prepared for it to have all been a dream. However, the actual end seemed to have been written for a different book altogether, so at odds was it with the rest of the book. On this point, everyone in the book club agreed.

One person noted how odd it was that we kept saying we loved the book even as we discussed what bothered us. For example, many members struggled to read it, confused by the fragmented plots and the time shifts. Several said they could only read a little at a time, though I barreled through it, as did at least one other person. Yet we did love it.

We loved the tenderness of this story. We loved the crows who brought her presents and the sailors who gruffly tried to help her. We believed in her mission, we who have seen the chestnut trees disappear, the wild dogwoods, and now the beeches. We’ve tracked the ups and downs of the crabs, oysters and rockfish in the Chesapeake, and participated in bird species counts. In our long lives we’ve known leave-takings and losses.

Read this book. Be prepared to be moved. And moved to action, even if it is only to go outside to appreciate the bright zinnias and sunflowers, to hear the whir of hummingbirds at the feeder, to see the deer moving like ghosts among the trees.

What have you lost that you can never get back? What journeys are you compelled to take?