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AN OBSESSION WITH WATER
ABOUT GRACE
By Anthony Doerr
402 pp.
Scribner. $25.
Reviewed by Christine Caya
David Winkler is a hydrologist in Anchorage, Alaska. On the outside, he is
an average man, perhaps even below average, who has an uncanny love of snow
in all its elemental forms. But on the inside, David has a gift. He has
dreams that tend to come true. He can foresee events from the simple and
mundane—such as a man in a park leaping for falling leaves—to the
extraordinary and life changing—such as the time he dreamed a man would be
split in two by a bus. His gift becomes a curse when he foresees the death
of his own daughter, Grace, and he is the one responsible. How David
responds to his dreams and the ramifications incurred are the basis for
About Grace. How his actions hurt and save those around him, his obsession
often overwhelming his common sense, allow David to become an endearing
character because of his fallibility.
About Grace opens with David returning to the United States after having
been gone for almost twenty-five years, searching for answers to the life he
abandoned. Doerr then catapults readers back to the beginning, when David is
an assistant analyst for the National Weather Service. He meets Sandy
Sheerer, who is married, and the two begin an affair, which is far from
sizzling and passionate. But Sandy is a woman whose personal relationships
are muted in contrast to the fire embodied in her later when she begins
working as an artist, welding. When she becomes pregnant, Sandy and David
run away to Ohio, where he’s accepted a position as a staff meteorologist.
It is not glamorous, but neither are David and Sandy.
In Ohio, David has fleeting happiness with his new family, but the dream of
his home and the streets filling with water, the current too strong, his
daughter drowning because of David’s choice, starts to take over his life.
His work and relationship with Sandy suffers. When the rain begins with no
end in sight, David must decide whether to stay and take the chance that
this will be the one dream that is wrong, to try and alter a reality his
premonitions have predicted, or to leave Grace, Sandy, Ohio, and ultimately
everything he knows and loves.
David decides to leave, and his flight takes him as far as he can go—the
Caribbean Island of St. Vincent’s. But his flight has still cost him. Sandy
returns to Alaska to her husband, Herman. She wants nothing to do with
David, and when he calls, she will not speak of Grace. David believes that
his decision to leave was too late and that he was foolish for trying to
change the outcome of things. On a neighboring island, David gains a
surrogate family with Felix, Soma, and their four children, and a
relationship is formed with their daughter, Naaliyah, that will save both
David and Naaliyah. Some of Doerr’s characters’ relationships feel
constructed, but his depiction of this surrogate father/daughter dynamic is
beautifully drawn with moments of elation, betrayal, guilt, and a love that
is fragile.
Many years later, Naaliyah leaves to attend the University in Anchorage,
and, with her departure, David begins his own journey back to his childhood
home in Alaska. His travels take him in search of those left behind, to
right the wrongs of his past, and also to try and protect their futures.
The traversing of time and place is handled quite adeptly as About Grace
spans a quarter of a century, crosses states, and even countries and
continents. The isolation of Alaska as a frozen tundra of physical place and
emotional place is contrasted skillfully against the sultry tropics of St.
Vincent, where the heat can become as stifling as the cold of the north. All
are held together by the imagery of water, an obsession of David’s, and, in
places, it becomes clear, an obsession of Doerr’s. A little goes a long way, and
while Doerr has moments of lyric purity and metaphoric genius, there are a
few too many of these moments. At times the pace is slowed, and the beauty
of a few images are forgotten among the deluge of so many.
But it is David who drives Anthony Doerr’s About Grace, and he is a
character who loves and loses love, even losing his own sense of self, and
must relearn love all over again. He struggles with decisions, isn’t flashy,
and he isn’t perfect. He is human and, for that reason, worth taking the
journey with.
About Grace is Anthony Doerr’s first novel. His collection of stories,
The
Shell Collector, published in 2002, was a New York Times Notable Book as
well as the recipient of many awards, such as the Rome Prize, the Ohioana
Book Award, two O. Henry Prizes, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize.
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