About Grace, A Novel by Anthony Doerr

Doerr is most recently known for his novel All the Light We Cannot See, which I’ve read and agree with the critics that it’s phenomenal accomplishment (also made into a short series for TV.) Literary, lyrical, and heartbreaking for much of the plot, a blind girl with only street memory has to overcome attacks from German soldiers during WWII. She has some help but always lives on the edge of disaster. Definitely, read it!

But my current project is to discuss Doerr’s first novel, About Grace. I should start by saying much of his style of writing is the same as in Light but perhaps more masculine (more on that later.) In About Grace, David Winkler, a bachelor weatherman in Anchorage, Alaska has a passion for snow crystals, something that follows him across the globe, even into the Caribbean. He has a premonition he’s going to meet a woman at the grocery store and then he does. He pursues her, even though she’s married, and ultimately wins her over. They move to Ohio and have a child: Grace.

We miss Grace in the book for a long time as Winkler has a premonition, believing he’s going to be caught with her in a flood wherein she’ll die. He also believes the only way to save her is for him to leave. So he leaves.

Key to the plot is that Winkler’s premonitions have been with him for his entire life, and they most always come true. This is the extent of what one might call magical realism in the book. It’s very meaningful and the premonitions govern the plot in many ways, but Doerr doesn’t over do it. That is, we find that we can go along for the ride assuming Winkler really can see the future because he doesn’t see everything, and he’s really not always right. So I allowed that Winkler does, in fact, have premonitions that need to be taken seriously. He does act on them and of course, the other characters think he’s either kidding or faking it, or he’s nuts. And he does toy with insanity at some level. We follow him across the world and ultimately back to Alaska where he seeks to restore himself with Grace and his wife, who moved back to her previous husband after Winkler left them.

In some meaningful ways, Winkler is a weak man, maybe made so by the curse of premonitions or simply because he’s an introvert’s introvert. Yet in other ways he’s strong given he does strike out for other destinations. But those actions are poorly thought out, poorly provisioned (if at all,) and at times it feels like he just finds himself in a new setting from which Doerr presents a new chapter in Winkler’s life. But ultimately, the book is a good read.

Of interest to writers is how Doerr weaves the action and character interaction with happenings elsewhere in the scene and especially employs setting in interesting ways:

Upon returning to Alaska, Winkler looks up his now-deceased ex-wife’s ex-husband, something not characteristic for him and it takes time to work up the nerve. In meeting him however, we see Doerr’s skill with emotion and setting: “Winkler shrugged. His organs swarmed. Here was Herman, living his life, carrying around his pockmarked face, his mending heart; his hockey skates beneath the coffee table, his health food in the freezer.” See the juxtaposition of the physical (pockmarked face) with the emotional (organs swarmed… …mending heart) and everyday setting (hockey skates beneath the coffee table… …health food in the freezer.) One other example of objects-as-emotion: “…he sat in the Datsun with the list of Grace Winklers in his lap. Beyond him was the town of Chagrin Falls, the neatly painted storefronts, Yours Truly and Fireside Books, the candy-striped Popcorn Shop. Through the drone of traffic, the clanging of a Dumpster somewhere…” we feel the intensity Winkler feels without being told directly that’s what he feels.

In short, setting is more than setting. As in any good novel, it becomes part of the story, but here it feels even more so: it informs character as well.

The use of setting and objects also plays well into Doerr’s emotional aspects: Looking for something to look forward to, Doerr invokes Winkler with “Hope was a sunrise, a friend in an alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.” The simple is the most meaningful…

So as not to belabor the point, read the book and you’ll find this weaving of plot, character, setting and object throughout, and all with a very lyrical sensibility.

As for the point about masculinity, the main character is of course, a man. But more than that, the deliberate application of Doerr’s weaving feels as if it’s a skill he has at the journeyman level in About Grace, resulting in a worthy, serviceable rug; and at the master level in All the Light We Cannot See where it becomes a carpet of immeasurable value.