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Book Reviewed by:At once an ode to birds, an elegy to space, and a journey into the most haunted and uncanny corners of the human mind, The Avian Hourglass showcases Lindsey Drager's signature brilliance in a stunning, surrealist novel for fans of Jesse Ball, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, and Shirley Jackson.
The birds have disappeared. The stars are no longer visible. The Crisis is growing worse. In a town as isolated as a snowglobe, a woman who dreams of becoming a radio astronomer struggles to raise the triplets she gave birth to as a gestational surrogate, whose parents were killed in a car accident. Surrounded by characters who wear wings, memorize etymologies, and build gigantic bird nests, and bound to this town in which young adults must decide between two binary worldviews—either YES or NO—the woman is haunted by the old fable of the Girl in Glass Vessel, a cautionary tale about prying back the façade of one's world.
When events begin to unfold that suggest a local legend about the town being the whole of the universe might be true, the woman finds her understanding of her own life–and her reality–slipping through her fingers. A reflection on mental health, the climate emergency, political polarization, and the growing reliance on technology, The Avian Hourglass asks readers to reframe how they conceive of a series of concentric understandings of home: the globe, one's country, one's town, one's family, and one's own body.
Chapter 45
The night Luce finds Pluto, I am late in getting home, having spent the whole day helping Sulien with the star house. She has been keeping her eyes down now and then, as everyone has, trying to spot the planets lodged in the ground. The trick, of course, is that everyone had forgotten about the planet demoted at the turn of the millennium, so no one was looking for it.
That evening Luce asks if I want to take a walk, and I agree and we set off. I'm not sure where we're going, but I let Luce lead and soon I find us walking along the perimeter of our town. Luce walks with a limp, and I can hear her breathe in with a jerk now and then, holding inside her a very ancient kind of pain. It may have to do with my father, the way that she's no longer a twin.
Just as we've gotten as far as the town will allow—the furthest point from the duplex within the town limits—just as I'm about to tell her I'm freezing and we should head back, she knocks her steeltoe boot three...
The setting is an unknown city, seemingly in the present day but in an altered world. There are no more birds and no more stars. The unnamed narrator is studying for a test that will determine whether or not she can be a radio astronomer. I loved the eeriness of this world, which is the same as ours aside from several huge erasures. These losses parallel the sense of longing the narrator feels thinking about her father and the abrupt departure, years prior, of The Only Person She Ever Loved. One of my few complaints about the book is that the setting is already enigmatic and foreboding — adding unnamed people and murky events distracts from the more interesting mysteries. The Avian Hourglass is a splendid novel in which many of us will find ourselves, our obsessions, our lonelinesses, and even our sense of wonder...continued
Full Review
(634 words)
(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin).
Jesse Ball, author of Census and The Divers' Game
Drager's The Avian Hourglass has the mingled timbre of Redonnet & Brautigan: lucid, injured, hope-drunk. It parcels out the world in queries. Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations and The Illumination
The Avian Hourglass is splendidly odd and arresting. Drager establishes her themes of loss and duplication and catastrophe and estrangement and connection and sends them orbiting perfectly around each other, round after round, in an orrery of grieving and wonder.
The narrator of The Avian Hourglass wants to be a radio astronomer, a revelation that caused me to realize that I don't actually know anything about that kind of astronomy. (For a moment I thought it was astronomy done over the radio so you wouldn't get to actually see anything cool.) I've since learned that radio astronomy is the use of radio waves to gather data, as opposed to "visible light" astronomy. By studying the radio waves emitted by celestial objects, astronomers can collect data even from dark or weakly-lit objects. The radio waves can be converted into images.
For the novel's narrator, radio waves tie everything together and always have:
"It was radio astronomy that introduced us to the idea of the Big Bang. Radio ...
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