Winding course to redemption
Luminous prose tracks one man's progress back to his family
Mary J. Elkins, Special To The News
Published October 22, 2004 at midnight
David Winkler, the main character of about grace, is a hydrologist, a man with an obsession about water. By profession, his field is "groundwater, mostly." By disposition, it's the whole huge mystery of water: "the size and shape of a raindrop," the geometry of a snow crystal, "the surface tension on top of a simple puddle."
For David, "Water was a wild, capricious substance. Nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared."
As the novel begins, David, 59, is on an airplane, flying home to Cleveland, Ohio, ending a 25-year self-imposed exile on a Caribbean island. He is returning to find out if Grace, the daughter he abandoned, is still alive.
His memories flesh out his life for us: He grew up in Alaska, a boy with no friends and no one to share his passions for water and weather except his mother, who not only shared them but instigated and encouraged them. He still owns a book that belonged to his mother, Snow Crystals by W.A. Bentley, which he treasures for its thousands of micrographs of snowflakes in all their variations.
Later he moved to Ohio, taking a job as a weatherman, and fell in love with a married woman who eventually left her husband for David, married him and became pregnant with their child.
The events that truly signify, however, are the ones that go on inside David's head.
He has dreams. And from time to time, his dreams come true. These dreams are more like warnings or prophecies than ordinary dreams.
"He called them dreams," Doerr writes. "Not auguries or visions exactly, or presentiments or premonitions. Calling them dreams let him edge as close as he could to what they were: sensations - experiences, even - that visited him as he slept and faded after he woke, only to re-emerge in the minutes or hours or days to come."
As a child, he dreamt of a man being killed by a bus and then a few days later, he witnessed the accident. Several lesser but still unnerving incidents like this followed and convinced him of the inevitability of his dreams coming true. And then he dreamt of the drowning of his daughter Grace and his involvement in her death.
He runs away to keep it from coming true, leaving behind an angry and confused wife. Now he is coming back and beginning a long and difficult journey, trying to find his family and redemption.
about grace is Anthony Doerr's first published novel; he is the author of an earlier, critically praised collection of short stories, The Shell Collection. His strength lies in what one critic called his "luminous prose." Doerr's beautiful writing carries the book.
Some readers will find the novel slow moving. And it is true that the action is secondary to the long introspective passages. For me, there are echoes of other novelists' voices in this book. Several of the characters are reminiscent of the gentle eccentrics who populate the novels of Anne Tyler.
In addition, there is something of Snow Falling on Cedars in this novel's method of revealing through flashbacks and in the authors' shared devotion to nature and its power both for destruction and healing. For as its title indicates, with "grace" uncapitalized, about grace is a novel about a man searching for salvation and finding it in the small unexpected kindnesses of ordinary people as well as in the grandeur of the natural world.
Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University.
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