First Fiction

About Grace

Anthony Doerr

Scribner: 416 pp., $25

About two-thirds of the way through Anthony Doerr’s ambitious first novel, David Winkler, a wayward, aging hydrologist from Anchorage specializing in snow crystals, finds himself in Camp Nowhere, a research outpost way up in the Yukon. It’s a fitting temporary destination for Winkler, who suffers the curious fate of being plagued by dreams that predict the future. Camp Nowhere, where Winkler lasts out a winter of endless nights and where a cup of boiling water, tossed into the air, freezes before it hits the ground, is the perfect no-man’s-land for a guy forever trying to bury the past and head off the future. And yet the past and future have done nothing but avalanche Winkler for decades.

Back in the ‘70s, Winkler, a promising young scientist, dreamt of a woman in a supermarket. When he encounters her in real life, she turns out to be Sandy, an unhappily married bank teller; their illicit affair turns into an elopement, and the two set up new lives in Cleveland, with Winkler working as a TV weatherman. But then another dream comes: their infant daughter, Grace, swept up in a flood and perishing when Winkler tries to save her. When the actual flood arrives, Winkler flees Ohio -- and Sandy and Grace -- rather than tempt fate.

So begins 25 years of exile on a tiny island in the Caribbean, where Winkler toils as an odd-job man and sends agonized letters to Sandy, which are returned, mostly unopened. In the snow-free tropics, surrounded by crystal-blue water, Winkler hunkers down as a sunbaked hermit, safe from consequence and, for the most part, his dreams: “The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts.”

Water, water everywhere. From snowflakes to floods to reefs to clouds: “About Grace” is an extended meditation on the tides and eddies of life itself, spun out in sentences that never fail to thrill, amaze or edify. Doerr scrupulously orchestrates the many tributaries of this sprawling narrative: There’s Anchorage and Camp Nowhere, Cleveland and the Caribbean, Sandy’s ex-husband and Winkler’s neighbors in the tropics; there’s the sleepwalking, the dreams and the hydrological asides; there’s the desperate, and late coming, return home and search for Grace and Sandy. Somehow, Doerr, the author of a celebrated story collection “The Shell Collector,” manages to keep this copious tale from becoming a levee break, creating an eccentric everyman hero as determined as he is wishy-washy, one who surrenders to dreams and ends up sleepwalking through life.

*

The Wasp Eater

William Lychack

Houghton Mifflin: 164 pp., $21

The wasp eater of this seductive novella from William Lychack is a 10-year-old named Daniel from Cargill Falls, Conn. The creaky old mill town has seen better days, and so has Daniel’s family. When his window-washer dad, Bob, is caught going at it with an unidentified woman in the family’s house, Daniel’s mother, Anna, tosses him out. The world suddenly seems inexplicable, as does some of Daniel’s behavior. With Anna jabbering about what to do about her ne’er-do-well husband, Daniel, cradling the desiccated carcass of a wasp in his palm, slips the insect into his mouth, “as if trying to swallow fear itself, the soft bead of it rolling over his tongue and teeth. He stayed silent, swallowing and trading weak for strong.”

This indelible event presages another, when Daniel embarks on a mission, via Greyhound, to a New York pawnshop to retrieve an heirloom ring, one that Bob is determined to present Anna in atonement. Daniel impulsively swallows the thing, and much of the second half of “The Wasp Eater” has Daniel and his whiskey-drinking father -- “the man with the sweepstakes smile and sly charm” -- on a strange road trip, waiting for the ring to pass through Daniel’s system. Bob offers frequent paternal encouragement. “ ‘So,’ he said to the boy, ‘any luck?’ ”

“The Wasp Eater” sounds more surreal than it is. At heart, it’s a graceful and all-too-brief exploration of a family in crisis, of an uneasy father-son alliance and of a boy who finds himself on the cusp of adolescence with much more to digest than just an insect and a diamond ring.