Transitions

~ Light on Snow, by Anita Shreve ~

The novel opens with 12 year old Nicky (Nicole) taking her daily afternoon walk with her father, and stumbling across an abandoned baby. They rush the baby to the hospital, and are carefully questioned by the police. The novel is not about the baby; it is about the Dillons, Robert and Nicky, who used to live a happy, contented, privileged life in New York until Nicky’s mother and Clara the youngest child, were killed in an accident. Unable to face his old life, Rob packs up the house and Nicky, and drives north, without knowing exactly where he would go, and serendipitously taking a wrong turn, settles in New Hampshire, seeking solitude and distance from the wider world.

Looking for a house, the Dillons are shown properties by a nosy estate agent, curious about why they would want to settle in the small town of Shepherd. Father and daughter do not answer the questions:

Had he been able to, my father would have made up the details of a life, simply to shut her up, but his imagination, like his heart, had deserted him.

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Anita Shreve’s writing is often simple, straightforward, devoid of drama, and yet she has a certain knack of choosing  and timing her words to make an impact, every place she deems the narrative needs it. It is not relentlessly intense – Shreve keeps the writing flowing and light for most part, and the story unravels easily and at a most natural pace – but at certain moments, like these, she makes her point, with a few well arranged words, the narrative under the skilful control of an author with mastery over her story.

As abandonment of a child in deep snow is tantamount to murder, and because he finds evidence that it is a man who has done the actual abandoning of the baby, Detective Warren questions them closely. However, they are not seriously suspected of any crime. Then 10 days after the finding of Baby Doris, as she is named at the hospital, and just as she is being taken into social care, a 19 year old shows up at the Dillons’ house – Charlotte – the mother of the baby, and because she faints, and the snowfall is too heavy when she regains consciousness, she is forced to stay on at their house, to Rob’s acute discomfort, and Nicky’s delight. The 12 year old Nicky who had wanted to keep the baby, does not seem to realise that Charlotte’s presence could make them accomplices and compromise their own position. In some ways, Nicky is extremely mature and capable for her age, but in others, perhaps a result of grieving and a father who is barely coping with his own grief, she is curiously emotionally younger than her chronological age. Because of our protagonist’s amazing resilience, mental and emotional, this novel deals with tragedy but never descends into the tragic.

This is not the kind of novel where you would find a twist at the end of the story, or where it holds you in breathless suspense awaiting another revelation. It is a more internal narrative, the rather shocking find of an abandoned, new born in deep snow triggering changes in the lives of father and daughter who are themselves grieving, bereaved, and building a relationship by pulling together the seams of a family ripped apart and reduced to half. The beauty of this novel lies in its description of landscape, the glimpses of the father-daughter relationship, the negotiation of the tricky transition terrain Nicky occupies between childhood and adulthood. This is not Shreve at her most powerful, but it is still a lovely little read.