About Grace is the first novel from Boise, Idaho based author, Anthony Doerr. He previously published a collection of short stories, The Shell Collector, which were both moving and gorgeous. One of the qualities of the stories contained in The Shell Collector, i.e., each story's deep connection to the natural world in which it takes place, actually becomes one of the chief weaknesses in About Grace.About Grace opens as its protagonist, David Winkler, a fifty-nine-year-old scientist, especially fascinated by all forms of water, is on a plane bound from the small Caribbean island of St. Vincent to the US after a twenty-five-year absence. David is an unusual man, in part because of his deep connection to nature, and in part, because he is prescient: he has dreams of future events, a fate he inherited from his long dead mother. Although some would call David's dreams prophecies, he, himself, prefers to call them simply, dreams. Sometimes these dreams work in ways David likes, as when he dreams about meeting Sandy, the woman who would become his wife; sometimes these dreams are mundane, as when David dreams that a piece of luggage will fall from an overhead bin on his flight from the Caribbean to the US; at other times, these dreams definitely take a malevolent turn, as when David dreams that his home is flooded and he fails to save his infant daughter, Grace, causing her death, instead.After the opening set-piece, during which David is returning to the US, Doerr then tells us, in long flashbacks interspersed with the present, how David, then a thirty-two-year-old hydrologist in Alaska, comes to meet Sandy, how she leaves her husband for him and how the two of them move to Cleveland, Ohio, where David works as a meteorologist. While the birth of Grace seems, at first, to make Sandy's and David's lives complete, David's dream of Grace's death is, to him, so frightening in its potential for realization, that he flees to St. Vincent, alienating Sandy and cutting himself off from Grace.In St. Vincent, David takes any job he can get and lives, basically, in dire poverty, forming a close bond with an expatriate Chilean couple, Felix and Soma. He becomes especially close to the small daughter of the family, Naaliyah, who will, after David's second dream of a death by drowning, perhaps become his own "saving grace."About Grace is a very internal, introspective, slow-moving novel. While I like introspective, character-driven novels as opposed to "page-turners," I thought About Grace was so slow-paced that at times, it stalled. Doerr, who can write beautiful prose, sometimes seems to be more intent on that than on giving us a story or even insight into his characters, instead. David Winkler, himself, is an exasperating protagonist. He's not a bad man; he truly wants to do what's best, for himself and for his family as well as for the Chilean family he comes to love, but he's underdeveloped, too wishy-washy, too indecisive, and too ineffectual. Even his decisive actions, like fleeing Cleveland for St. Vincent, have an aura of desperation about them that diminish David in our eyes rather than cause us to empathize with him. And although Doerr most certainly wants us to focus on David and his inner turmoil, it's very difficult to do so when David, himself, focuses more on nature.Doerr's lovely prose is totally sans cliché. He writes clean prose. He writes poetic prose. This is, sadly, one of the problems with About Grace. Doerr seems so focused on giving us a highly poetic story that he allows the poeticism in his novel to take over. While I love lush, poetic prose, I don't care for it at the expense of story or characterization. The poeticism of the stories contained in The Shell Collector wasn't a problem. But what works in a fifteen or twenty page story, that is quite impressionistic, isn't going to work in a novel of four hundred pages. After fewer than one hundred pages of this stuff, I began to sigh and long for something that at least resembled a story or a little character development that didn't relate to the majesty and grandeur of water in all its myriad forms. And I’m a nature lover. Big time.Doerr also drifts into the unbelievable when he tries to describe the love between the already married Sandy and David. At one point David thinks, regarding Sandy:He could study the colors and creases in her palm for fifteen minutes, imagining he could see the blood traveling through her capillaries.Even the most dyed-in-the-wool, poetry loving romantic, one certainly not against love, even love at first sight, has probably never, not even once, thought of the blood traveling through his/her beloved’s capillaries, at least in a romantic sort of way. They probably didn’t even want to think of the blood traveling through anyone's capillaries, loved one or not. Now, I’m not a child, I don't need magic slippers and knights in shining armor, but I just couldn't believe in the love between Sandy and David. It just wasn't realistic to me.I realize Doerr wanted to hammer home the idea that David Winkler is a scientist, but I think he hammered a little too hard. Another problem with characterizing David as the "ultimate scientist" is that Doerr also asks us to accept the fact that David is enough of a poet-at-heart to accept the metaphysical, the mystical, the unexplainable. For me, the two never came together the way they should.The plot - what plot there is - is also driven too much by coincidence. I can accept one or two coincidences in a novel, even a novel that's supposed to be a "slice of life," for after all, coincidence is but a part of life. But in About Grace, some of the story's major plot points turn on extravagant coincidence, something that caused me to shake my head and mutter, "Oh, please." Had this been a comic novel, something along the lines of those written by Carl Hiaasen, for example, the coincidence would have been easier to swallow, for Hiaasen's novels aren't meant to be taken seriously. About Grace is.The theme of About Grace in implied in its title, of course. This is a book about achieving a state of grace in life and the difficulties one must go through in order to do so even more than it’s about a man’s search for his daughter. It's a book about discarding the safety of a belief in predestination and actually living one's life with passion, with intensity, with an embrace that encompasses both the beauty and the pain. I loved this theme, but I don't think Doerr pulled it off.Doerr is a young writer, and for one so young, his mistakes are forgivable. But while forgivable, they don't make for good, compelling reading unless you want to read an extended meditation on the majesty of water. Even though About Grace put me to sleep more times than it engaged my heart and soul, it pains me greatly to award it only one stars. It's obvious that Doerr is a very talented writer, but it's also obvious that he needs to learn a bit more about his craft. And in the long term, perhaps he'll always be better at the short story than the novel. The two require very different skills and Doerr's seem to definitely lie with the shorter form. Although it pains me to do this to a writer so obviously talented, I really can't recommend this book. The characters are infuriating and they lack humanity, something this book really needs in order to succeed. The plot meanders off course far too often, and in the end, despite the pretty prose and well-turned phrases, the whole thing is a massive bore. Skip it and read The Shell Collector instead. It's really worth every minute you spend with it.
After loving All the Light We Cannot See, I turned eagerly to Doerr's earlier novel, About Grace - and was reminded that often writers get better the more they write. This book contains many glimpses of the wonder of All the Light, but doesn't soar.As in his later novel, Doerr does a breathtaking job of blending science and poetry. Here's a recollection of our main character, David: "His first week in college he met with a counselor and made earth sciences his major. A chemistry unit on the hydrologic cycle that had other students yawning seemed to him a miracle of simplicity: condensation, precipitation, infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration -- water moved around and through us at every moment; it leached from our cells; it hung invisibly in front of our eyes. Theoretically, water was inexhaustible, endless, infinitely recycled. The ice in his mother's freezer was millions of years old. The Egyptian Sphinx was carved from the compressed skeletons of sea animals." (46) That's really beautiful. There are so many paragraphs that sing like this.I fully enjoyed David's obsession with water in all forms. We learn a lot about snow when he lives in Alaska, and a lot about oceans when he lives in the Caribbean.Which brings us to the Caribbean... David has dreams which foretell the future, and enough of them come true that he becomes obsessive about them. In an effort to save his infant daughter, Grace, from death in a flood, he leaves his family and ends up on a tropical island. He stays here, in a state of arrested development, for over a quarter of a century. This part of the book just didn't work for me. First, the use of dreams as a way of moving the narrative forward never sits well with me. Plus, it seemed uncharacteristic of David, a scientist, not to empirically self-test his dreams' predictive qualities (or lack thereof). Rather than engage in any structured study or attempt to get medical help, he just falls apart... like water condensing over North America and coming back down over the equator.There are some pleasing parallelisms in the plot. Naaliyah's growth as a scientist is satisfying. David's lack of emotional growth left me wanting more.I enjoyed the novel enough to finish it, but it never quite reaches its potential.
What do You think about About Grace (2005)?
I had mixed feelings about this book. I cared about the sentences, not the characters. They just never came alive for me. The writing is gorgeous, particularly the passages about water in all its permutations--snowflakes, clouds, rain, puddles. I love the idea of a novel growing out of geography and climate, as this novel clearly does. I just don't think it drew me in as I expect a book to. The characters never felt like real people. The were caricatures for me. And I love Doerr's stories and his book about living in Rome for a year. Read the beginning, skimmed the middle when he leaves Sandy and Grace, and then read the last few chapters.
—Jane
"I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.” -- Hamlet An awful gift, a dreadful mistake, half a lifetime of doldrums and then repentance form the arc of this first novel by Anthony Doerr, whose second All the Light We Cannot See has been a near-universal favorite in 2014. I recommend About Grace very highly, though stinting one star on goodreads because I haven’t yet given five to any fiction (except humor) not read at least twice. By repentance I don’t mean just mea culpa pleas for forgiveness, wails of guilt. The deeper meaning is a change in path, a re-thinking of what one did or said and action on new life. The writing is keen and poetic. Characterization is gentle, vivid, without hard edges. This being an odyssey, there are down times in plot (25 years on a small island chain) and hurried, searching, journeys. The protagonist. David Winkler, is a bright myopic nebbish who grew up in Anchorage AK. We learn from a flashback in Chapter 10 that at age nine he had had a nightmare from which he was awakened by his loving mother, screaming and trying to put on his shoes. The omniscient narration tells us the dream was of a pedestrian, no one he knew, fatally hit by a bus, with a graphic detail: the victim was carrying a hatbox that spilled out a “gray fedora.” Significantly, young David did not tell his mother the dream’s content but seemed upset for hours. Two days after, David saw a man struck and killed by a bus in real life (and death). A gray fedora fell from the broken hatbox the man had been carrying. I see two interpretations of this sequence. Either David has second sight, or he unconsciously grafted the details of the terrible sight – the bus and the hat -- into the inchoate recent memory of a nightmare. This is more plausible, more rational. All of us have had horrible nightmares of catastrophes, some of which may involve recognizable persons in our lives. I have a recurring one of watching from the ground a jumbo jet losing power not high off the ground and inexorably descending into a crash. These started after 9/11 but have no details. I can tell people about them, not convinced they foretell any specific event. I must have had nightmares about the death or injury of a loved person, but cannot today ever remember one. When they happen, they are not, thank God, cinematically clear as David’s seems to have been, but chaotic and bizarre like most dreams. This allows me to dismiss them, let them “fly forgotten” in the morning and never speak of them. I would feel guilty having dreamed them. After a big-news disaster it is not uncommon to hear urban legends of friends of friends who foresaw it, but very seldom did the seer go on record beforehand with unambiguous pertinent details. What is usual, perhaps unique, about David’s dreams is the clear, trivial details (a dropped magazine, a concrete block, a dangling computer mouse) that are exactly what he will see in the real event. This makes them much more frightening.Whether David has second sight or a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, he will for decades believe that his visions in sleep, even dreamt just once, foretell destiny. He will be deathly afraid of them, unable to think they could be wrong or give a chance to change in reality what he saw in the dream. After he is nine, we hear of no fresh examples until, in a happy reversal, at age thirty-two, he meets his future wife in circumstances he had seen in a dream. This the best thing in his life to that age.Then fear after another ominous dream not long after marriage sends him on a blind panicked run from his new wife and little daughter, a complete cutoff that lasts twenty-five years. Only when he has used the message of another horrifying prophetic dream to do something really good can he repent. At last he is ready to look for his abandoned wife and daughter, not knowing if either lives.Is this book realistic or magical? Someone who can’t credit second sight and prophetic powers can still read it with interest and sympathy though having to label David with some sort of mental illness; poriomania is not a good fit, nor is a dissociative fugue state without amnesia. It could be seen as a chronic delusional system. Though I really appreciate fiction that is firmly realistic (say, Saul Bellow’s or Tolstoy’s or in a different sphere Ann Tyler’s) I’m ready to accept some magic in fiction. Then the book is about breaking the curse of second sight.About Grace is a book of kindness, which abounds in it.
—Stephen
About Grace is about a man, David Winkler, and his ability to see things/situations that haven’t happened yet.I loved the premise of the book and bought it strictly on the blurb. I realize that this will sound contradictory, but… The book is beautifully written. Doerr’s prose is poetic. I would consider this more of a literary read than most contemporary fiction on the market today. That said, as beautifully written as it is, I can’t see my way to giving it more than 3-stars.Getting into the book was a bit daunting. There was a lot of the kind of things readers tend to skip. Paragraph upon paragraph of narrative that didn’t do much to aid or further the story. Although his characters were well-developed, I didn’t feel there was enough of ‘them’ in the story. It was more about the landscape of the book.In my opinion, Doerr has the potential of being named among the literary greats, if there was more substance to his story. He has the writing down, but he did little in the way of story.If the actual writing, the lyrical prose, is what draws you to a book, you will love About Grace, but if you’re looking for more of a story without concern to the poetic flow, you might want to try something else.
—Kathy Reinhart
