New York Review of Books Review

WHAT DOES HOME REALLY MEAN? Is it the people around you who make a place familiar and loved, or is it the tie to land that's been in your family for generations? Anna Quindlen's mesmerizing new novel investigates both, seen through the eyes of the indelible Mimi Miller, who narrates the story of her life - and of the assault to the people and to the land she loves - from her 1960s girlhood to the present day. The book begins with the summer Mimi is 11 and everything around her is about to change in Miller's Valley. She lives with her parents, her older brothers - rakish Tommy and practical Eddie - and her Aunt Ruth, her mother's sister, who harbors a terrible secret, and who never leaves the confines of her small house behind Mimi's. The farm has been in their family for almost 200 years, and Mimi can't imagine life beyond it. The land has always been wet, it seems to Mimi. There's always a sump pump running in Mimi's house, and when it storms, mud comes right up to the front porch. But then, the government steps in, deciding to flood "6,400 acres of old family farms and small ramshackle homes and turn it into a reservoir by using the dam to divert the river," transforming corn fields into strip malls, drowning the valley under water, along with a way of life that has been perpetuating itself for generations. They'll buy up homes and resettle everyone, insisting that new is so much better than old. At first the town stubbornly resists, except for Mimi's mother, who everyone expects will fix things, but instead, she cryptically announces, "Let the water cover the whole damn place." But Mimi is desperate to stay. She has no idea what else there is to want, or where else she could possibly live or who else she could possibly be other than a girl on a farm with her family. Her father, too, is tied to the land he loves, and Ruth balks at even stepping outside her house. But as the river is allowed in, dampening the ground, loosening ties, it seems to drown people little by little, forcing secrets to float up to the surface and change things in ways you might never expect. What do you do when your way of life is gone? Who do you become? And what do you now consider home? Quindlen makes her characters so richly alive, so believable, that it's impossible not to feel every doubt and dream they harbor, or share every tragedy that befalls them. Mimi founders, watching as those she counts on leave her, as the land begins to fall away. Her mother is mysteriously bitter toward Ruth, and closemouthed about why. Eddie grows into an efficient man, more like a "friendly visitor" than a brother, who sees and seizes opportunity, becoming an engineer and building new homes for the displaced, as if the future were like a bright, shiny penny. Tommy, the sibling Mimi adores, gets by working odd jobs, car repair, and later selling drugs and going off to war and prison, a man who just tragically never found his place. But what's Mimi's place? "I knew there was a world outside," she says. "I just had a hard time imagining it." When she gets highest honors in school, her mother insists, "This is your road to something better than this." And then to Mimi's astonishment, she gets a full scholarship to medical school. She doesn't want to leave, but finally, slowly, she begins to move toward her future, to gather ambition and purpose, and to truly see beyond the confines of her life. If there is a weak link at all, it's Donald, a childhood friend of Mimi's who moves away, but promises to come back to her. Somehow, though, he doesn't lodge on the page the way the other characters do. He's steady, and without interesting corners. If he's so devoted to Mimi, why hasn't he made more effort to visit more often? Why hasn't he written more than brief letters, signed with "sincerely"? What is there about him, except for his stolidity in a rapidly changing world, that endears him to Mimi? Still, the novel is overwhelmingly moving. The town is so detailed that we can hear the grain waving in the wind, "the cattle complaining like a bunch of old men with tobacco throats." We experience how the land changes through the "foggy mist of summer" to "the dry-ice mist of winter." And of course, the haunting descriptions of the floodwaters, channeling in, "slowly at first, and then faster, harder, so that on the evening of the third day the people in town said they felt a faint tremor and thought Miller's Valley was having its first earthquake." The ending fast-forwards like a kind of majestic tide, carrying all these lives we've come to deeply care for into middle age and beyond, as people marry, birth children, move on and, yes, die. Family bonds are restructured, and secrets (one so startling, you never see it coming) are revealed that either wedge people apart or bind them together. But Quindlen also allows her characters mystery - and some of what's unknown stays unknown, which burnishes her story with a kind of haunting grace and truthfulness. Here, in this novel, where so much is about what vanishes, there is also a deep beating heart, of what also stays.