The comforts of shared honesty; notes on Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles

The earth slows in Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles, days and nights lengthen, birds die, insects flourish, tides grow,  vegetation begins to fail, cultivation requires huge amounts of energy, the magnetic fields begin to fail and the sun's radiation begins pouring into the western United States. Amidst this slowly unfolding catastrophe, middle-schooler Julia is attempting to navigate puberty, first love and the collapse of her parents' marriage.

Early on in the book, while the ramifications of the earth's slowing have yet to become clear, the tone of the book is lighthearted, bouyed by a young girl's perspective. It grows darker as the consequences of the slowing pile up over the course of a year. Over that calendar year, Julia ages many years. She loses the sunshine of her earlier self.

The year of the slowing is a year of loss. For Julia, it is a year of losing things she never knew she had till they disappeared. Julia laments, "We were worse off, most of us, than we had been before. Some grew sick, some depressed. A great many marriages dissolved under the stress. Billions of dollars had drained from the markets. And we were missing certainother valuables too: our way of life, our peace of mind, our faith"(175).

In part, the adults and children around her cope by denying; by continuing to try and live as they did before. Soon, they decide that they will live by clock time, even if this means that many days they rise and work and go to bed in the dark and on other days the reverse. This general, widespread denial is almost invisible since so many are participating. And, seeing as there is little that can be done to reverse the earth's slowing, perhaps it is an understandable response. Some can't abide the denial and decide that they will live by the sun, or by real time, and many of these folks form outsider colonies in the desert.

All the big psychological dramas unfolding in the face of the earth's slowing are also played out in the smaller domestic sphere of Julia's family. Echoing the denials and lies of those wishing to ignore the earth's slowing, Julia's parents also participate in lies to hide the dissolution of their marriage and assuage their guilt with indirect acts of love. Julia's father has started an affair with the neighbor woman and Julia has learned of it. She witnesses her father's infidelities, his lies, his guilt. She suffers all this knowledge silently alone.

One episode reworks the novel's concerns with denial, lying and it's uses. When her mother suffers a fainting spell behind the wheel of a car and hits a bystander, she remains groggy when she comes to and is not clear as to whether the bystander is alive or dead as he's carted off to the hospital. However, Julia, who remains aware throughout doubts it. Her doubts are confirmed when she overhears her father take the call from the hospital informing him that the man died. She's shocked to learn her father, in a desparate and guilty stab at doing his wife a kindness, has told her mother that the man survived and will be fine. She discovers that the "lie improved everything." Before her mother had been in the doldrums and depressed, but quickly regains some vitality and bounce. The family gets together and has a fancy dinner; "we sat on the deck in the sunshine, food filling our bellies. I wish I recalled more nights like that one...my mother was happy, her conscience clear and I knew I'd never tell"(162). Julia learns at home the comforts a lie can supply for a time.

But grief always returns; loss is inevitable and often sudden and unpredictable. As her parents fall into their separate, estranging miseries, Julia begins to rely more and more on her first crush and boyfriend, Seth Moreno. Seth has recently lost his mother to cancer and Julia feels "he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief." Julia finally confides her father's infidelities to Seth. He shares her outrage and a better, more honest and lasting comfort is achieved.

Karen Walker Thompson's Age of Miracles

Middle-school, puberty are not fondly remembered by many. Imagine going through it while the world, i.e. the earth, seems to be slowly coming to the end. This is the premise of Karen Walker Thompson's  novel, The Age of Miracles. It is both wacky and profound and all's told with a grace and a deceptive simplicity.

At the start of the book, without anyone's noticing at first, the world starts spinning a bit slower day by day, adding minutes to each day and night. Eventually, unspecified "authorities" notice and on a normal seeming Saturday an announcement is made. As you might suspect, this causes certain changes leading many to panic. Birds start dying off en masse, tides advance a bit further inland, gravity increases forcing everyone, from ball-players to pilots to adjust, serotonin levels increase releasing inhibitions prompting impulsive behaviors......And, ultimately, as the days and night grow longer, the ability to grow food on earth grows imperiled. All this "Big Stuff" is happening and Thompson tells about it from the eyes of a middle-school age girl, Julia.

For Julia, all the big-picture, apocalyptic changes are on her radar. But, so are all of what we normally think of as the "small-picture" events: her best friend growing apart from her, other friends growing boy-crazy, her body slow development, her crush on Seth, and, most worrisome to her, the growing cracks in her parent's marriage. These small picture changes and dramas keep happening, and the characters in the book are really good at ignoring the catastrophe unfolding and getting wrapped up in the everyday and the dramas of their lives. Maybe this is a function of the slow speed of the catastrophe. Undoubtedly it is also a form of denial.

In part, the necessities of life demand a certain level of denial. Soon after noting the slowing, citizens in California are asked to order their lives by clock time for the smooth functioning of society. When Julia and her classmates return to thier floodlit school one Monday morning in the middle of a long night, They are "told to disregard the bells, now rogue, the whole ell system having come unhooked from time"(43).

 Julia and those around her become increasingly conscious of how dependent they were on the earth's ancient and unnoticed movements. The earth's regularity, its seemingly eternal consistency has instilled  a certain child-like faith that the world is tailored to their needs and wants. Like a child become aware of their parent as a separate being, they experience a profound loss. Thompson's Julia observes "It's hard to believe that there was a time in this country-not so long ago-when thick almanacs were printed every year and listed, among other facts, the precise clock time of every single sunrise and every single sunset a year in advance. I think we lost someting else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things"(96).

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl is a missing girl mystery on the surface. On the afternoon of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunn gets a call at the bar he owns. A neighbor reports that his front door is wide open. Nick goes home to discover that his wife, Amy Dunn, to whom he is not so happily married, is not home. She appears to have left in a hurry; an iron atop an ironing board has been left on, the living room shows signs of a struggle. Immediately, the police become convinced of foul play and Nick becomes the prime suspect, despite the fact that Flynn has pretty much clued us in that Nick is....not a likely suspect. Soon though, a whole host of mysterious and terribly incriminating evidence starts popping up that pretty much points to him, not only the likely, but the obvious suspect.

As the police pursue their case, as Nick tries to make sense of his world as it starts quickly falling apart, we are taken through his and her recollections of the Dunn's marriage. The mystery at the heart of the book is puzzling, but the Dunn's marriage is truly more confounding. There marriage truly is a hell. Neither can stand the other but neither can stand to leave. Very quickly, the reader not only want to know what happened to Amy, but also how  and why this couple ever married. What were they thinking?

Actually, the mystery only deepens the further back Nick and Amy go. In the early days, their relationship seems a wonderful union. Later, Nick claims, "I'd fallen in love with Amy becausee I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. ..I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive"(214). Amy's recollection glows similarly: "[Nick] was the first naturally happy person I met who was my equal. He was brilliant and gorgeous and funny and charming and charmed...I thought we would be the most perfect union: the happiest couple around"(224). And, for a while they are.

Five years on though and all has gone to hell. They become the couple who only stay together because neither can give up the game of besting, torturing the other. And, yet, while Nick is the chief suspect and tons of evidence points to him as the person responsible for Amy's disappearance, Flynn leads us to believe otherwise. So....what' happened to Amy?

If you read this, make an effort not to skip ahead. There are certain structural features, chapter headings, that will begin to give away what has happened. Regardless though, Flynn has contrived a plot that should surprise any reader. And, it's hard to rush through this book since the writing, the detail on the characters, the dialogue, the quips and descriptions are so original and consistently funny. You want to know what happened but you don't want to miss a line of Flynn's fabulous, funny, inventive writing.

Alif, the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Every once in a while you read a book that impresses you a great deal upon reading but which leaves you a little underwhelmed in retrospect. Such was G. Willow Wilson's promising and often enchanting Alif the Unseen, a love story mixed up with a good guys/bad guys adventure chase story. Both unfolding in marvelous, unreal places, the online world and the Empty Quarter, a mythic no-man's land  home to the Djinn, mysterious, mercurial spirits mentioned in the Koran as a third creation between the angels and man.

Alif, the main character is, a very real, mixed-blood (Indian and Arab) twenty-something living in frustration with his mother in a backward, unnamed Persian Gulf emirate. He passes his days online and, not of pure Arab bloodscratches out an income of sorts by providing firewalls and encryption to various digital discontents intent on keeping hidden from their State's security apparatus.

In his free-time, he strikes up a romance with a wealthy, upper-class young woman, Intistar he meets in a dissident chat room. Love blooms till her parents insist on her marrying a suitor who comes seeking her hand, a man high-up in the emirate's digital security system, whom the Emirate's hacker community has tagged with the comic-worthy monicker, "the Hand." While she's content to face the reality of her parent's demands, Alif has a tantrum and creates a program to shield himself from Intistar online. Intistar manages to contact him one last time via Alif's neighbor, Dina, a serious young muslim girl from Egypt who holds a candle for the unwitting Alif.

Intistar contacts him to deliver a book, The Alf Yeom, to Alif. It is a mysterious collection of stories, like the One Hundred and One Nights. Alif quickly learns it is an ancient, powerful and much wanted book. In particular, Intistar's husband to be covet's the book and immediately puts the Emirate's security service to work to locate Alif and the book. And, although he's primarily interested in Intistar because of the book, he nevertheless is jealous of Alif and looks to stick him in a prison and starve him to death.

Alif is forced to go on the lam with Dinah who gets swept up into his predicament by accident. Their escape takes them on a wild journey across a variety of digital and spiritual realms, from back-alleys in the Old Quarter of the city where they meet the sinister, mercurial and supernaturally powerful Vikram the Vampire, to immaterial planes where the Djinn make their home, to a mosque in the heart of the city where they encounter Imam Bilal, the voice of a wise Islam. All prove no match for The Hand, and Alif finds himself locked away like the Count of Monte Cristo, starving in the dark without hope, till.....

The mysteriously peers from her author photo bedecked in a veil and the veil is a central preoccupation of the book. Wilson attempts to reconstruct it's meaning by presenting the veil as an instrument of power, a piece of clothing that affords woman a species of privacy and anonymity, the power to observe without being observed. The veil confers a power and pleasure on a par with that conferred by the anonymity of the web. Poor and foreign, Dinah picks up her veil as a class statement, defying her parent's hopes that she will eventually be able to go into high-priced servitude with a wealthy sheikh's family. Not for her.

Although Alif is the central character of the book and the action is instigated by him, Dinah is the book's soul. She is a religious person, but capable of surprises, of tremendous strength and daring. The ostensibly more modern Alif is indeed the drearier, more predictable character. Indeed, as Wilson is at pains to point out, we are all "programmed" by our culture and it is up to us to inject code from elsewhere, to write into that programming some fuzzy logic if we wish to grow and be more. Dinah is there to teach this to Alif. Yet, I'm not sure that Wilson manages to fully pull this off. This is meant to be the education of the digital, non-spiritual Alif by the girl-wonder Dinah and the Imam Bilal.While Alif grows, the nature of that growth is murky: he comes to realize that surfaces are just that, that much lies beyond and behind what is visible to the eye, that one can never pay enough attention, that ritual and routine are necessary to our happiness? I guess. And, he comes to some of this but I'm not clear as to how that reflects Dinah or her brand of Islam.

Still, there's plenty here to keep one's attention and I loved the blending of old and new. It seems important to have modern, imaginative forward thinking voices who maintain a healthy respect for traditions. Wilson seems at pains to keep all of this together, most likely to the displeasure of many, and it seems chary to criticize.