Fighting against the current

I've just finished reading Anthony Doerr's novel About Grace, in which David Winkler performs an extreme about-face for fear he will harm his daughter and then years later performs another to find out about Grace. A hydrologist obsessed with the way the water cycle connects every part of the planet, Winkler excels in fighting against the current, taking the hardest route straight through obstacles and mostly uphill, but the final section is a thrilling joy-ride downhill all the way. It takes a bit of a slog to get to that section, however; a more focused middle would make the novel more compelling. Doerr's chief strengths are his lyrical prose style and his ability to infuse ordinary substances with extraordinary significance. In his short story "The Shell Collector," simple shells provide an opportunity for a reimagined incarnation; in About Grace, there's water,water, everywhere:

What were dreams? A ladle dipped, a bucket lowered. The deep, cool water beneath the bright surface; the shadow at the base of every tree.....

He would reach across the tablecloth; she might even let him take her hand. They'd talk about the malleability of time, about relativeity, about premonition. He'd tell her that he believed events could be foreseen, that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment, that he had always loved her, even when he couldn't bear to, and that this, too, was prefigured and inevitable, burned into him, the way the six sides of a snow crystal were honecombed into its very atoms.

The luminous short stories collected in The Shell Collector hinted at Doerr's talent for seeing things slant, for making something brilliant and unexpected out of mundane material. About Grace has its memorably sparkling moments, but the intensity that suffused the story "The Shell Collector" is unsustained in this longer work. Still, About Grace invites readers to plunge into a weird watery world where floods threaten and snow falls and in the end the waves keep rolling in.