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.