About Grace by Anthony Doerr

Doerr is one of my favorite fiction writers for his use of language. And this novel maintains, for hundreds of pages, the precision of his best short stories, "The Shell Collector" and "The Hunter's Wife." It also interestingly enough combines the two locales of those stories--the Caribbean and someplace cold and snowy.

And it's got a pretty genius premise for keeping you hooked. The protagonist has dreams that reveal the future (usually innocuous things like a dropped glass of ice tea, but once, as a child, a premonition of a man losing his head to a bus). Toward the the start of the novel he dreams that his baby daughter drowns in his arms in a flood. So when it starts raining--and raining--and raining--he flees. And his fled wife won't tell him if the baby lives or dies and he is too afraid to go home and find out. For twenty-three years. For twenty-three years, hanging over his plot (which goes in various directions), is the question of did his daughter live or die. It's a very effective page-turning-device in an otherwise lyric, quiet novel.

But what I wanted to mention is how the novel does one of my mom's favorite things--teaches you something. The protagonist is a hydrologist--and water in all its forms makes for lovely metaphors even when you are describing it literally. So reading along you learn things about snow and ice and rivers and sea creatures, all while the metaphoric subtext of those literal descriptions ekes its way into your heart. A good example of the emotional embedded in the physical.

The Shell Collector: Stories by Anthony Doerr

I've been thinking lately about what makes a story stay with me. I read quite a few stories that I enjoy momentarily, but quickly forget. I don't love every story in Doerr's collection, but a number of them --"The Hunter's Wife," "The Shell Collector" (which is the story that led me to read the rest) and "Mkondo" are lingering stories. While these stories clearly demonstrate something is at stake (that old workshop workhorse) for the main characters, they don't insist on solving or even fully idenitifying the problems at hand. Characters are hurt, upset, sometimes emotionally devastated, but they never articulate their thoughts on those problems to the reader nor do they think through their solutions/options. The narration never goes deeply into their heads, but instead stays close to the action. Instead imagery--particularly nature imagery--is used to represent emotional states--and it is those images, as well as a sense of disquiet--that lingers.

I've been feeling lately like I've been urging my students to over-simplify. Usually this is because they're so so abstract. But in fighting abstraction, perhaps I've gone to far in favor of absolute clarity. Perhaps my emphasis should not be on specifics in point of view (what is everybody thinking), but more in specifics in image (what is everybody sensing).