LYDIA DAVIS

LYDIA DAVIS

Only a small number of the books I read this year were recent ones. But one of the best was the novel Red Rover (Viking), by Deirdre McNamer. It is thoughtfully and densely written; it is solid and direct, yet such is the richness of the writing that one is constantly engaged with it on the levels of language, imagery, and wit, even as one is responding to the appeal of the story itself. And the story is an absorbing one-the unraveling of the mystery surrounding the sudden death of one of two brothers, a mystery apparently modeled on one that occurred in McNamer's own family. I would not usually have gravitated toward Red Rover's subject matter-boys in horse country, pilots in World War II, the FBI in Argentina, Charles Lindbergh flying over Montana-but, as I should have known, any subject at all becomes engrossing when it is well narrated; and indeed, I found myself hooked, on the very first page, by McNamer's eloquence, compassion, and gentle humor, and then utterly captivated a couple of pages later by her vivid, thoroughly imagined description of the first of the book's several accidents. What is more, the form of the novel, which takes us forward and back in time, without transition, over the decades between 1927 and 2003, not only has the uncanny effect of telling us the "answer" as to what will happen to these complex and likable characters; it also shows us our own future, by example, and gives us a very tangible, and curiously liberating, sense of how brief our lives really are.

[Author Affiliation]

LYDIA DAVIS IS THE AUTHOR, MOST RECENTLY, OF VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: STORIES (FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 2007).