Goldengrove, by Francine Prose

As someone who has recently lost a young relative, I was both drawn to and repelled from this novel. It took me about a week of looking at it there in the basket before I actually picked it up to read. When I finished it this afternoon, I was both relieved and sorrowful.

Goldengrove begins with Nico, 13, and her older sister, Margaret, floating on a boat in the middle of a lake near their family's home in upper New York state. From the outset, even had I not known the premise of the story, I would have known that something was about to happen. The sensuousness of the story, the lush detail, dripped with foreshadowing. Within pages, Margaret is dead, and we are left floating adrift in Nico's devastation.

Unfortunately, the family drifts in completely different directions, retreating almost completely into their own worlds. While each makes small attempts at reaching out to the others, nearly the entire year after Margaret's death shows them all drowning in their own self-induced isolation. Prose focuses on Nico and her process of coping with the unspeakable, which includes browsing morbidly through medical texts and compilations of paintings of near-drowning victims while working at her father's bookstore, establishing an ultimately unwise relationship with Margaret's boyfriend, and facing the townspeople as they, too, fumblingly navigate the aftermath. Her parents' coping mechanisms are described and interpreted through Nico's eyes; one of the best lines in the novel occurs when Nico, who is trapped on a strained car ride worrying about obviously medicated mother, pauses in her adult worries about her mother's erratic driving and thinks, 'Why couldn't she help me first and deal with her own suffering later?' It is this sort of back-and-forth writing that makes the novel. Prose gives Nico just the right balance of adult-child comprehension and action, and forgoes the typical teenage angst that many writers feel compelled to imbue their characters with. It is an honest depiction of a normal child in a horribly abnormal situation.

My only complaint about the book is that about two-thirds of the way through, it started to drag a little. The stage had been set, the pot was almost boiling... and it stayed that way for a good thirty or forty pages. Sometimes I get the feeling that authors have a set number of pages in mind that will make their work the Perfect Length, and this is a mistake. However, the ultimate resolution for Nico is worthwhile, and Prose made me feel glad that I had followed her through to it.

Rating: Five out of six stars; engrossing, haunting, revealing, redemptive.