“At once a love letter to the world as we know it and an elegy.”
—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
People ∙ O: The Oprah Magazine ∙ Financial Times ∙ Kansas City Star ∙ BookPage ∙ Kirkus Reviews ∙ Publishers Weekly ∙ Booklist
People ∙ O: The Oprah Magazine ∙ Financial Times ∙ Kansas City Star ∙ BookPage ∙ Kirkus Reviews ∙ Publishers Weekly ∙ Booklist
The Age of Miracles
by Karen Thompson Walker (Goodreads Author)
“It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . . Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a stunning fiction debut by a superb new writer, a story about coming of age during extraordinary times, about people going on with their lives in an era of profound uncertainty.
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life--the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.
With spare, graceful prose and the emotional wisdom of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker has created a singular narrator in Julia, a resilient and insightful young girl, and a moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.(less)
Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a stunning fiction debut by a superb new writer, a story about coming of age during extraordinary times, about people going on with their lives in an era of profound uncertainty.
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life--the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.
With spare, graceful prose and the emotional wisdom of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker has created a singular narrator in Julia, a resilient and insightful young girl, and a moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.(less)
www.theageofmiraclesbook.com
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Normalcy Grinds to a Halt
‘The Age of Miracles,’ Debut Novel by Karen Thompson Walker
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: June 18, 2012
In the 1954 Ray Bradbury story “All Summer in a Day,” Earthlings who have colonized Venus see the Sun shine only once every seven years, and then only for a couple of hours: The rest of the time it rains, and a little girl, who has recently arrived from Earth, is mocked by her schoolmates for describing her memories of what the Sun looked like from home.
THE AGE OF MIRACLES
By Karen Thompson Walker
272 pages. Random House. $26.
This story is referred to in Karen Thompson Walker’s much anticipated first novel, “The Age of Miracles,” which reads as if it had been inspired by Bradbury’s classic tale and sprinkled with some extra “Twilight Zone” magic dust. The premise of Ms. Walker’s novel is this: The rotation of the Earth has begun to slow, and days and nights are growing longer and longer. All the scheduled rituals of daily life are disrupted.
More ominously, as days and nights elongate, people start getting sick and acting out. Crops begin to fail, the oceans rise and flood waterfront homes, and food and water are hoarded. There is talk about the end of the world, and the possibility of emigrating to space or another planet.
“The Age of Miracles” has made headlines for reportedly earning its first-time author a seven-figure deal. What sets the story apart from more run-of-the-mill high-concept novels is Ms. Walker’s decision to recount the unfolding catastrophe from the perspective of Julia, who is on the verge of turning 12. Her voice turns what might have been just a clever mash-up of disaster epic with sensitive young-adult, coming-of-age story into a genuinely moving tale that mixes the real and surreal, the ordinary and the extraordinary with impressive fluency and flair.
Whereas Tom Perrotta fumbled his depiction of a big, supernatural event in his 2011 novel, “The Leftovers” (which imagined the mysterious, Rapture-like disappearance of people, whisked away by God or some kink in the space-time continuum), by expending lots of energy on the more implausible aspects of his tale, Ms. Walker focuses on the impact that “the slowing” has on the everyday life of Julia and her parents and friends. She looks at how it subtly magnifies emotional dynamics among family members and how it echoes the upheavals of adolescence.
Her novel will remind many readers of Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel, “The Lovely Bones”: It, too, is told from the perspective of an adolescent girl — or, in this case, a grown woman recreating those pivotal years in her life; it, too, creates an elegiac portrait of an ordinary world, forever rocked by terrible events.
A former editor at Simon & Schuster, Ms. Walker has an instinctive feel for narrative architecture, creating a story, in lapidary prose, that moves ahead with a sense of both the inevitable and the unexpected. She conjures the suburban Southern California world where Julia has grown up with a native’s understanding of its rhythms, rituals and weather.
And while the characters may initially seem like stock figures from young-adult fiction, Ms. Walker maps their inner lives with such sure-footedness that they become as recognizable to us as people we’ve grown up with or watched for years on television: Julia, a quiet, observant girl, who has a terrible crush on Seth, a cute boy who may turn out to be her first real love; her mother, a former actress, given to hyperbole and dramatic gestures, who finds all her worst fears coming true; her father, a practical-minded doctor, who’s grown increasingly impatient with his wife’s histrionics; and her grandfather, a would-be survivalist, who wants to teach Julia how to shoot a gun.
As “the slowing” begins, Julia says she remembers feeling “not fear but a thrill” — “a sudden sparkle amid the ordinary, the shimmer of the unexpected thing.” Soccer practice is forgotten, television is carpeted with news reports, and her cats start behaving oddly. Then it becomes clear to her that this is not something temporary but a species-threatening development. The food supply is imperiled, and changes to Earth’s gravity make people sick. Soon the widespread use of sunlamps and artificial heating during the longer and colder nights will create energy shortages and periodic blackouts.
Ms. Walker never explains the science of “the slowing,” but she does a credible job of charting the avalanche of consequences. To preserve order the government asks people to remain on the 24-hour clock, even though that would mean falling out of sync with the Sun: “Light would be unhooked from day, darkness unchained from night.” Sales of blackout curtains and sleeping pills spike, and some people take to sleeping in their basements.
Not everyone goes along with the plan, and soon there are colonies of “real-timers,” who insist on trying to change their own circadian rhythms. They are mocked and shunned by the clock-time people.
There is also an uptick in crime: “We took more risks. Desires were less checked. Temptation was harder to resist. Some of us made decisions we might not otherwise have made.”
Or so Julia thinks. “The slowing” is, in some respects, a simple metaphor for the precariousness of daily life and the contingencies of the modern world. And Ms. Walker artfully blurs the line between what are reactions to “the slowing” and what are the everyday irrational actions of ordinary human beings.
Are the growing tensions between Julia’s parents a symptom of the stress they’re feeling from “the slowing,” or would their marriage have hit the rocks, no matter what? Is Julia’s new sense of vulnerability a reaction to “the slowing,” or a response to the hormonal convulsions of adolescence and the small cruelties of her schoolmates? Is her on-again, off-again relationship with Seth shadowed by “the slowing,” or is it simply a reflection of the vagaries of young love?
“The Age of Miracles” is not without its flaws. There are moments when the spell the author has so assiduously created wobbles, and moments when a made-for-Hollywood slickness seeps into the story. Some minor plot developments feel as if they had been created simply for pacing, and Ms. Walker sometimes seems so determined to use Julia’s circumscribed life as a microcosm of the larger world that the reader has to be reminded that “the slowing” is supposedly a planet-altering phenomenon.
Such lapses, however, should not distract attention from this precocious debut — they certainly will not stop this novel from becoming one of this summer’s hot literary reads.
No comments:
Post a Comment