First Fiction

A Winter Marriage, Kerry Hardie, Little, Brown: 394 pp., $24.95

Hannie Bennet, the thorny, headstrong heroine of this relentlessly bleak yet utterly engaging novel from Irish poet Kerry Hardie, is one of the most fascinating and infuriating characters to come along in years. She’s tyrannically stingy with her biographical details, but we do know that she’s of Dutch and Indonesian extraction, spent most of her life in Africa surrounded by colonial opportunists and a smattering of husbands, and now arrives, in middle age, at the winter marriage of the title -- ostensibly settling in, settling down, and most of all, settling for Ned Renvyle, an aging, level-headed Irish travel writer. The hasty marriage goes down with equal parts clear-eyed calculation and total denial: Hannie’s beauty is fading, her resources are running low; Ned is an intrepid loner, turning away from the Odyssean life and hunkering down in a moldering Irish farmhouse. As you can guess, the romance quotient is zero, which is precisely how the cruelly pragmatic Hannie wants it, even if she gets the occasional twinge of doubt: “Briefly she acknowledged to herself the mistake she had made in coming here. Then she set the knowledge aside. She turned from the river and walked back up to the house.”

The house. Not quite the grand pile of the stranded gentry, and by Hannie’s sunny African standards, a dank, dark cubbyhole, as oppressive as the provincial locals -- that staple of Irish fiction -- who nose around her and Ned’s business. The soft, brooding landscape drives her batty; it’s as “dense and secretive” as she is, and so unlike wide-open Africa, “where men and beasts moved light as thought across the land.” It’s in Africa where, one assumes, her past secrets lie out in the open, and it’s also where her troubled 14-year-old son, Joss, waits to be summoned to Ned’s household.

What develops is a drip-by-drip accretion of ill will, strained patience, cold silences, and on Hannie’s part, bizarre adulteries, as winter enshrouds Hannie’s life as an embittered, compromised woman playing out the consequences of her self-interest, “the narrowness of her options, the sordid smallness of her many shifts and prevarications.”

What’s truly miraculous here, aside from Hardie’s ability to pick apart like a neurosurgeon every tiny interaction between Hannie, Ned and the increasingly out-there Joss, is that Hannie never comes across as a shrew. And as “A Winter Marriage” veers perilously toward a winter death, and Hannie’s past life can no longer remain buried, we begin to discern a twisted core of altruism inside Hannie, this flinty creature whose unwavering integrity is built upon equivocation, need and cruelty.

*

The Snowman’s Children, Glen Hirshberg, Carroll & Graf: 324 pp., $24

What do we want? Closure. When do we want it? Now. If Mattie Rhodes, the unsettled Gen-X hero of Glen Hirshberg’s amiable novel about fuzzy nostalgia and gruesome serial killings in suburban Detroit, were a political movement, that could well be his slogan. “[O]ne of the primary reasons for coming back here, is that none of my stories have endings,” he tells us. “Here” is the old neighborhood, where Mattie, at age 11, got mixed up in some traumatic business involving a roving sicko known as the Snowman. Now, in 1994, Mattie’s marriage to his banjo-picking wife is on the skids, and he drives up from Louisville, checks into the Troy/Birmingham Moto-Court, and begins poking around for signs of the long-ago era when rookie Mark “The Bird” Fidrych was on a quest to win 20 games, when the Motor City was all about plant closings, and when other stuff was going on that Mattie’s in no hurry to tell us about.

Hirshberg creates a vivid sense of Detroit’s endless suburbia and its underlying tensions of aspiration and race. But Mattie’s constant reassurances that what he once went through was a very big deal -- “the events of that one Detroit winter cast me adrift, left me frozen and bewildered in a relentless private snow” -- aren’t enough to hold our attention until, inevitably for this closure-obsessed narrator, the end, when every twist is belatedly revealed. With so much story to tell, it’s weird that Hirshberg plays it so coy, smothering this snowbound tale under a blizzard of artificial suspense.