On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

If you’ve ever spent the day rafting on a river, then you know you carry the river’s rhythms back on land, the sensation of gently rocking to an unseen current. I felt something similar when I finished reading Jamie Harrison’s deep and lovely novel The Center of Everything (Counterpoint, purchased e-book). Maybe it’s because the Yellowstone River is such a part of the story, or because memory moves like water through the pages, but I didn’t want to leave the world of the book.

At its center is Polly Schuster, living in 2002 Livingston, Mont., with her husband Ned and their two small children, planning a party for Great-Aunt Maude’s 90th birthday. Her retired schoolteacher parents are helping out, and Polly is trying desperately to act like her usual self even while recovering from the concussion sustained in a recent bike accident. She forgets things, her attention span is erratic, she lapses into momentary waking dreams. “Lately, Polly thought her mind was a river, constantly scouring and pooling, constantly disappearing, filling with details that glinted and vanished.”

A helicopter buzzing overhead is an unwelcome distraction, a reminder of the ongoing search for a beloved local babysitter apparently drowned in the rushing snow melt of the Yellowstone. Polly thinks accidents are like arrows, and this one pierces her mind in unexpected ways. She imagines the drowned girl floating underwater, her face turned to the moon. But she also remembers past drownings observed when she was a child, although her mother asserts she’s confusing memory with reality. Maybe not. In sequences set largely in the summer of 1968, when Polly was living with her great-grandparents on the Long Island shore, family secrets and tragedies are revealed that echo down generations. But Polly’s eighth year is largely idyllic as she and family friend Edmund swing on the tire, ramble through the woods and on the beach, ignore the adults. It is only years later that childhood perceptions will give way to adult recognition. Harrison moves easily between Polly’s past and present, writing beautifully of the wonders of nature, the mystery of family, the kaleidoscope of memory. I can’t say enough good things about The Center of Everything. I’m reading it again.

Imagine two teenage girls walking together, obviously best friends. The thin, pale one is 14-year-old Josie. The one with dark hair and kind eyes is Klara, an almost state-of-the art AF — artificial friend. A robot created to be a companion and who once stood in a storefront window waiting to be chosen, Klara is also the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s beguiling and bittersweet new novel, Klara and the Sun (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley). Reminiscent of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, it also wrestles with questions of memory, identity, love and what it means to be human in a near-future dystopian world. There’s the subdued, subtle prose that hints at darkness to come, the wistful, melancholy tone. Klara and Kathy H., the narrator of the earlier novel, are cousins of a sort, both characters whose fate is determined by science. (So is Josie, as it it turns out.) But Klara and the Sun is a kinder, gentler Never Let Me Go. It touches the heart but doesn’t quite break it.

Josie’s mother at first hesitates to buy solar-powered Klara, thinking a brand-new model might be better. But Josie is insistent, and her divorced mother gives in, because Josie is suffering from an unnamed illness for which her mother feels guilty. More of Josie’s circumstances are revealed as the story progresses and Klara gets to know the boy next door who Josie’s longtime friend but one with a different future chosen for him. There’s also Josie’s father, met on a visit to the city, where Josie goes to see a mysterious portrait painter. Everyone wants the best for ailing Josie, and Klara is no exception, making a bargain with the life-nourishing sun that sets her on an unusual adventure.

What am I talking about — the whole book is unusual, and the more so because of the deliberate ambiguity of the setting, familiar in many ordinary details but remarkably strange as perceived by Klara. When she encounters the unknown, her vision fractures into a series of boxes until her programming adapts. Don’t be surprised if Klara and the Sun rocks your world.

Abigail Dean’s harrowing debut Girl A (Viking, purchased hardcover) is one of those books that is as hard to put down as it is to read. It needs to come with trigger warnings — child abuse, imprisonment, psychosis, suicide. But while the subject matter is the stuff of tabloids, Dean’s story avoids sensationalism because events are filtered through the understated voice of Alexandra, a sucessful 30-year-old lawyer. Fifteen years ago, she was “Girl A,”  the one who escaped from her parents’ “House of Horrors” in a suburban English town and told authorities about the brothers and sisters left behind. Now their mother has died in prison, naming Lex executor of her will and leaving the house to her and her siblings, who were adopted separately. Lex and younger sister Evie would like to turn the house into a community center so something good can come out of their disastrous childhood, but Lex will need each sibling to sign off on the plan.  Getting in touch with the others, though, is a journey into a past they would rather forget.

This is how Dean structures the book, splicing present days scenes with glimpses of the past that begin with Lex struggling out of chains and breaking a second-story window to get away from years of starvation, neglect and her father’s cult of control and failed zealotry. A meeting with older brother Ethan who is planning his wedding leads to Alex’s memory of days when her family was still relatively normal but how her father first slapped 7-year-old Ethan at Sunday dinner when he thought his authority was being challenged. Things go downhill in increments — the children are teased at school because of dirty clothes and empty lunchboxes, then comes the isolation of homeschooling and rote learning, no baths, rationed food, the first bindings. Delilah lies to their  aunt that all is well just as Lex starts to say otherwise. Gabriel is always bruised. Evie whimpers in her sleep. The siblings are individually and collectively damaged as children, and they remain broken in various ways as adults.

So Girl A is not a happy story but it is a fascinating one as Dean artfully explores how memory both helps and hurts trauma survivors. You can hardly see Lex’s physical scars anymore, and she believes her psychic wounds are well hidden. But they are there. Memory bleeds.