Devotion and Its
Aftermath
A Review By Charles King
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Devotion and Its
Aftermath |
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Good Grief | Miranda's Vines | One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead |
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To give one’s self to another or to an idea is generally a virtue. Indeed, most notions of love, passion, and intellectual or religious conviction rest to some degree on subsuming the self as a means of achieving greater, deeper benefits. But what is the ultimate cost of devotion? Love’s endings are not all happy. Conviction that becomes obsession can have tragic or even fearful consequences. Minds and times change, ideas and their contexts evolve, hearts and words are broken, and sometimes mended. Here are three new novels that touch on the cost and rewards of human devotion. |
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Sophie Stanton, the heroine and narrator of Lolly
Winston’s first novel, Good Grief (Times Warner, $18.00), is
suffering a devotion hangover, the result of the all to early death of
Ethan, her husband of three years. But Sophie does not simply wallow in
grief, she wallows through it, recounting fifteen (instead of Kubler-Ross’s
miserly five) stages along the way. If this sounds over the top, it is, a
bit. Without Ethan to receive her devotion and love, Sophie is at sea,
working her way up to and over the edge of a breakdown, then through the
awful, necessary, painful, joyous, terrifying healing process. Throughout,
Winston keeps a tighter reign on the novel’s plot and dialogue than Sophie
keeps on herself, to often humorous and wise effect. Good Grief is
punctuated with lines that inspire laughter, but some catch in your throat
when their price becomes clear. Winston’s book does suffer some small
missteps; a near perfect paramour, a near-mawkish holiday gathering. Sophie
finds that she can hold herself together by holding others together. In a
sense, she becomes a serial nurturer, and while it is true that we can heal
ourselves by helping others heal, that effort does not come cheaply. Good
Grief works best when Sophie receives what she works so hard to achieve
(though it is often not quite what she expects or hopes for) and recognizes
what she has paid for success. From the beginning, Winston does a laudable
job of creating a narrator the reader wishes only the best, but the reader
sometimes wonders if Sophie should have held out for bit a more. How long
characters stay in our minds, whether we wonder how their lives are
progressing long after we have closed the cover on their stories, is every
novel’s measure of success. Overall, Good Grief succeeds admirably.
Miranda Perry, the heroine of Kimberly Kafka’s Miranda’s Vines Dutton, $23.95) has it all; a talented chef nearing the apex of San Francisco’s cutthroat culinary world, a successful single mother of a talented and sweet-natured little boy. With investors lining up to bankroll the restaurant she has always dreamed of, Miranda’s life is turned upside down by the death of her father and her inheritance of the family’s Perry Hill vineyard in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Miranda heads north to divest herself of her childhood home, but things happen along the way. With the vineyard buckling down into the growing season, an immediate sale is out of the question. In addition, Miranda’s sorting of personal priorities is derailed by memories and reengagement with her extended vineyard family. Most importantly, after her dearest childhood friend, Bridie, is grievously injured, Miranda brings her home to Perry Hill to recuperate. But unexpected characters and conflicts complicate matters even further. While this may sound like the set up for a primetime melodrama, in Kafka’s sure hand Miranda’s Vines never gives in to dramatic excess. Instead, the novel’s depiction of memorable characters engaged in life altering circumstances and events rings consistently true. In addition, Kafka takes advantage of the natural flow of seasons and corresponding vineyard and winemaking processes to drive the narrative. This material is never intrusive, but lends Miranda’s Vines additional emotional weight. At its heart, Kafka’s novel focuses on the intimate relationship between people and the land, and on the way that abiding connection foreshadows, affects, and even rules their interactions with one another. Kafka explored this theme in her first novel, True North, but in Miranda’s Vines she offers a sustained, narrative performance that any novelist would kill for and every reader should enjoy.
Historical
novels depend largely on singular, compelling characters, and it is
difficult to imagine a fictional character more singular or compelling than
German meteorologist Alfred Wegener, the narrator of Clare Dudman’s new
One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead (Viking, $25.95). Born in 1880
and best known as the originator of the theory of continental drift (for
which he was soundly ridiculed during his life), Wegman’s obsession with the
natural world was tempered by his horrific experiences during World War I,
and by his love for his devoted wife Else. But Wegener lived at a time when
the line between scientists and adventurers was still very fine. His serious
studies of lunar impact craters, the flow of ice, and rain drop formation
were interspersed by long distance balloon travels and extended, dangerous
explorations of the Greenland ice cap, including an ill-advised final trip
to the northwest coast of that desolate region. But even the most compelling
life can be reduced by the shaky excesses of a second rate novelist.
Fortunately for Wegener and readers, Dudman is not a member of that sorry
fraternity. In One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead, Dudman
delivers a sensitive, sublime, technically bravura performance with
Wegener’s first person narrative of his travels and travails. Alternately
touching and mesmerizing, Dudman’s prose reads like the perceptive, private
journal of a visionary captivated by the world of nature, but somewhat at
sea in the world of humanity. While One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its
Dead follows an inevitable course of tragedy, Dudman’s perceptive
examination of Wegener’s achievements reveals a life where disaster was
offset by personal and professional integrity. Forward to Next Series of Reviews
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