Storms, Bombs, Contagions, Pandemics and Pandemonium

Glass, who gained the Nationwide Ebook Award for her first novel, “Three Junes,” is a masterful builder of fictional individuals, an knowledgeable at charting the structure of complete lives. However at occasions “Vigil Harbor” evokes the sensation of an overgrown backyard. There’s sufficient materials right here for 2 or three separate novels, and Glass’s maximalism creates a sure diffuseness of theme because the reader is offered with nearly too many competing pursuits to trace. (Among the many most enchanting of its numerous threads is the presumably fantastical story of Issa, Austin’s long-ago fiancée, whose magical coat and eccentric persona sign that she could also be some form of sea creature posing as a human being, however this thread doesn’t really feel absolutely built-in into the story.)

Sure thematic questions additionally really feel barely unresolved, notably with regards to politics. Within the aftermath of Vigil Harbor’s brush with the eco-terrorists, when a journalist from a “hipster newspod” refers to Margo’s front room as a “haven of home privilege” and costs that it’s straightforward, “in a spot like this, to disregard problems with social justice,” Margo reacts with defensiveness and annoyance. Her college students, Margo rants, learn “‘Hiroshima,’ they learn performs about revolutions and poetry about hate crimes. That they had an training in shadows solid throughout civilization far bigger than these solid by any rain forest.” (The destruction of the world’s rain forests is the primary concern of the guide’s violent eco-terrorists.) “You’ll be able to develop towards that gentle even in a spot like this,” Margo insists. “See it as decadent if you want, however it’s not so easy.”

On this second, Margo, a often sympathetic, even sensible, character, comes off as troublingly proof against the tough questions of what the privileged amongst us would possibly owe to the remainder of the planet. How can she really feel so sure of her personal ethical standing? It’s a complicated scene, maybe meant to point out the contradictory impulses that make this girl human, however it raises compelling moral questions with out absolutely participating with them. It feels extra like an acknowledgment of this territory than an illumination.

The place this guide shines is in its portraits of grief and uncertainty. Virtually the entire characters in “Vigil Harbor” have suffered nice private losses, the type from which their privilege can’t shield them. As they ponder what to do and be, these individuals usually really feel unmoored, and their disappointment fantastically echoes the sense of ecological loss that so many people really feel. (On a visit to California to go to his daughter, Mike notes “the dearth of birdsong” but in addition attracts solace from the pure magnificence that’s left — and from new life: His daughter is having a child.)

One of the crucial transferring moments in “Vigil Harbor” seems late within the guide. The traumatized however recovering Brecht writes to his frightened mom after returning to New York, “I’m on an island whose shoreline is threatened, there are guards and cops and rangers and all types of uniformed individuals conserving an eye fixed out for hassle, there are flood basins the place there was basketball courts, there are stretches of summer time when the temperature hits 100 levels 5 days in a row, and there might loom storms, bombs, contagions, pandemics and pandemonium, however I’m doing all proper.”