Travels in Quinnehtukqut

As the sun rose the morning of the day when the walls and floors
The blacktop has buckled. The car jolts. Roots from these tall trees

and roof of her house were to be sawed into pieces, broken apart
have stretched beneath the road; water has seeped through the bed of

by crowbars, raised on jacks, liften onto flatbed trucks and driven
gravel and sand, and frozen during the winters; spring thaws have

six and a half miles southwest....
weakened the road's edges....

So begins the last section of Joshua Harmon's Quinnehtukqut, a book I've been alternately breezing and struggling through for two weeks now. This last section consists of two separate stories, one in normal type and one in italic, presented in alternating lines for more than 30 pages. It took me a while to figure out how to read these pages; I finally settled on reading the plain type all the way through and then starting over on the italics. I suppose it would be possible to simply read straight down the page as if these were lines of poetry, but this reading method obscures the narrative. Of course, that may be the point.

I can see several reasons Harmon might have elected to structure the narrative this way. The two stories share some thematic concerns, each featuring a woman who leaves home while carrying home with her. The two women move through the same territory in opposite directions, their trajectories overlapping without ever intersecting, like lines on a page. One woman sees the territory as "less a home than a delay in some unknown course," which could just as well describe the novel itself, for it constantly delays the delivery of the story even beyond the final line: "She has just begun the story, and there is still so much to tell."

There are many things I appreciate about this book. The prose is lovely even when the stream-of-consciousness style is difficult to follow, and Harmon's ability to build the narrative out of a variety of materials from myth to maps to local gossip creates a rich fictional world that seems to exist simultaneously in the realms of fairy tale and journalism.

And yet: I miss the story. Harmon writes for the kind of reader who considers straightforward narrative and character development passe; he eschews or obscures plot to the point that the story gets lost beneath its own impressive machinery. At one point the main character (about whom we know little more than we know about any other character) recalls an earlier conversation: "Every man tells the tale of his life, he had said, and she answered And every woman must listen. But who will tell mine?"

I've been listening carefully for two weeks and 225 page, and I'm still looking for that story.