Knopf
Review by David Starkey
California Review of Books is a bit late to the party in reviewing Anne Michaels’ Booker-nominated third novel, Held, although perhaps we may be excused for working on an extended timeline, as there was a thirteen year gap between her first novel, 1996’s Fugitive Pieces, and The Winter Vault, and an almost fifteen year gap between the publication of that novel and Held. Appropriately, time is one of Michaels’ central subjects in her latest novel. It both wrenches people apart and yet, at times, seems irrelevant in the face of deep and abiding love.
The first of the novel’s twelve chapters is set in a World War I battlefield in France. The protagonist of that section is John, a British soldier so wounded that he cannot move. All around him are dead comrades, and John fully expects to join them soon, as he dwells on his beloved, Helena, while also revisiting significant moments in his own life. “Memory seeping,” the novelist tells us. The story is told in tiny bursts of prose separated by asterisks. Sometimes there are three or four of these narrative flashes on a single page, and while the effect is jarring, it’s a fitting way to convey the thinking of a badly injured man on the verge of death.
Not to worry, though, for a few thousand words later we are in a new chapter, entitled “River Esk, North Yorkshire, 1920,” and John is alive, if not exactly well, and lying awake next to Helena, who is “swimming in the river of sleep, her cotton nightgown riding up under her arms, her hair floating around her.” (Poetry, readers will be unsurprised to know, is Michaels’ other genre.) In the intervening years, John has returned to his occupation as a portrait photographer. It’s mostly a rewarding job, although John’s assistant, Mr. Stanley, feels distinctly Satanic. Things change when John’s photographs begin to show dead people, “semi opaque, but perfectly distinct,” hovering around his living subjects. John shares the photographs with the people who have commissioned them, but he refuses to sell or publicize them to the wider world, much to the avaricious dismay of Mr. Stanley.
I’ll halt the plot summary there, for fear of giving too much away, but I will say that after chapter two, the reader should be prepared to rocket from one new set of characters to the next, and from one time and locale to another—from “River Westbourne, London, 1951” to “River Orwell, Suffolk, 1984” and then back to 1964 in the same location, ultimately ending up at “The Gulf of Finland, 2025.” Bodies of water are notable in the chapter titles, in large part because they emphasize how human interactions flow backwards and forwards in time.
And water isn’t the only metaphor Michaels employs to explain our relation to the past:
We think of history as moments of upheaval when forces converge, the sudden upthrust of the ground we’re standing on, catastrophe. But sometimes history is simply detritus: midden mounds, ghost nets, panoramic beaches of plastic sand. Sometimes both: a continual convergence of stories unfolding too quickly or too gradually to follow; sometimes too intimate to know.
That last sentence could very well serve as a description of the novel’s aesthetic. Some of Held’s intertwined stories last a while, other shoot past us like comets, leaving only a trail of themselves behind. And yet if the stories Michaels wants to tell are “sometimes too intimate to know,” her project as a novelist is try anyway, to do whatever she can to capture in words the elusive nature of our strongest emotions–anger and fear and loneliness and, above all, love.
