“There is a sign in my grandfathers’ workshop that says this: 180 degrees is half a circle, but also a line.”

Readers of Lindsey Drager’s new novel, The Avian Hourglass, spend more than a few pages in the front yard of that workshop, and glimpse its contents, workbenches of tools and uncounted globes: models of the Earth. It all remains frozen in time since the men, a devoted couple, left off working there. Yet late in the story, when this sign is revealed, it offers a metaphor for the relation of this book, and all of fiction, to the real world from which it inevitably draws so much of its material. Reality and fiction are like subject and portrait, sharing the same identity, just as those two 180 degree turns share a mathematical description. But beyond that, the world is real, while it makes no sense to call it true, and fiction, while not real, at its best is true.

There is a particular significance to this difference when considering the unstated theme of The Avian Hourglass: the book’s occupants recognize they are in the middle of an environmental and social Crisis, and fear it will lead to a Catastrophe of unknown proportions. Meanwhile, like the globes that model Earth, the novel models our present moment. One symptom in The Avian Hourglass is the disappearance by extinction of all birds, whom the older characters remember, while the young know them only from stories and recorded images. The other is a nearly constant fog that blots out the stars at night and threatens to prevent viewing a long-anticipated solar eclipse. The hope is soon enough expressed that the Catastrophe that is expected to follow the present Crisis can be avoided. The reader may emerge with the knowledge that the twists and turns of the novel could bring about a U-turn, a 180 degree reversal, while in the reader’s reality, there may well be a straight line to Catastrophe.

The narrator of The Avian Hourglass is given no name. The only times she refers to herself, in writing, she titles herself “Her.” The town Her lives in is similarly unnamed, but also given no location. Utah readers will recognize in it qualities of the many small towns, survivors of the region’s settlement, that grace the land. This town is the only place referred to specifically, and a crucial location therein is the spot where the only mentioned road out of town comes to a mysterious dead end. In spite of this, several characters refer to their desire to move away and live elsewhere. One of them, whom Her refers to invariably as The Only Person I’ve Ever Loved, supposedly left for awhile, then returned, but no one seems to know where she went, or even if she was actually gone.

I’m afraid all this may leave the impression that this is a bleak book. There’s an unavoidable element of that, given its context, but the story is one of people who are both convincing and appealing, whose lives feature powerful connections between themselves. Some of these connections, which properly appear to be among the most durable, are platonic, and while homophobic readers might not care for them, others may rejoice in the way same sex relationships play essential roles throughout the story.

One thing that binds the seven principle characters (whom Her counts at one point) is that those who have jobs, however informal, all do something creative. Aunt Luce, who was Her’s late father’s twin, does a variety of jobs at an IT firm that, throughout the book, follows the lamentable course of digital enterprises as the ever-wealthier corporations shrink away from the thrilling new vision they began with, having now achieved enough success to become exploitative and repressive. Luce, who now inhabits the grandfathers’ house, along with their workshop and a front yard that features 150 or so defective globes, each a wonderful comment on the geography and physics of Earth, finally quits her job and takes upon herself the repair, updating and manufacture of the earths.

Uri is the brother of the woman who, along with her husband, contracted with Her to be their surrogate and bear their triplets, only to see the couple die in a car crash before they could properly meet and welcome their children. He then quit his job in insurance, bought a duplex with the insurance money, and set out to assist Her in raising them, a task that ranges from providing a home to fixing dinner every evening.

Sulien, whose origin isn’t explained, though in time we learn his heartbreaking secret, is an inventive craftsman, in whose hands the most basic materials become marvels. He will build an outdoor theater and the star house, in which children who have never seen stars will encounter a convincing representation of what they missed.

The triplets, the not-quite orphaned children of Uri’s sister, her husband, and Her are a magic trio, in their own world much of the time, as is to be expected, but also a kind of Greek chorus commenting on what they witness.

And Her, who began driving a bus that allowed her to observe life in the town from an unusually candid point of view, loses her job when the system is automated, but continues her primary and ultimate creative labors—fostering the three brand new human beings she brought into the world and, let us not forget, telling the story we are following: the story of how they all learn who they are.

On the strength of her previous books, such as The Archive of Alternative Endings, Lindsey Drager has been labeled a science fiction writer in some blurbs and reviews. This isn’t really accurate. While technology does play a role in The Avian Hourglass, this author reverses the usual trajectory. Rather than inject debatably human persons into a technological nightmare, she brings a credible level of technology to bear on deeply-feeling humanity. For much of Her’s life, she has studied to become a radio astronomer, a task that gives her a lot of scientific perspective, but nothing to seriously daunt the naive reader. Techniques of recording experience, like tape recorders, CDs, two-way radios and so forth, do play a part in the story, serving as assistants to recollection and enabling memory to extend far beyond an individual’s own experience. Once the town begins to discover that it has a forgotten connection to the solar system that they then avidly seek to recover, astronomy becomes an element of the story. The planets all having been named for their gods, a little Greek mythology is more helpful here than astrophysics, but just how it fits in the story is part of what keeps the reader turning the page, rather than an encumbrance to further reading.

Theater enthusiasts will appreciate an essential subplot concerning the production of a play about the fall of Icarus, conceived and performed by Uri, which engenders a fair amount of speculation about the nature and impact of this art form on its audience. Before it ends, the play brings about one of the novel’s several reversals, as the audience becomes the performance and Uri, in turn, becomes the audience—a moment that can only be fully appreciated by reading the story as it progresses in the book. Another moment that should not be given away is the appearance of the titular, poetic machine: the hourglass.

This may be the first book to confront the inverse exploits of reading: how the reader enters the book and the book almost simultaneously enters the reader. There’s a generous offering of philosophical speculation here, most of it readily accessible, and a host of subplots. It’s an interesting thing about so many ideas in one place, in that just as Sulien invokes the sundial as having been in very different use during the same era as the hourglass, contrary ideas can usefully coexist if permitted.

With such a plethora of subplots, perhaps a super plot needs finding. One candidate might be the division of the townsfolk into YES people and NO people, who are as incompatible and irreconcilable as the red and blue states we read about somewhere else. There are purple states, as well, and just so, in time the YESes and NOes begin to give way to MAYBE people. Another candidate is the countless versions and many revisits of Girl in Glass Vessel, a folktale invented here that parallels concerns The Avian Hourglass addresses. A clear case of putting new wine in old bottles, it may be the most challenging element for some to absorb. Your reviewer put it on a mental shelf for a future reading. But it has also appropriately taken on a life of its own, outside the novel.

The arrangement of 180 chapters in reverse order recalls the point that Uri makes so often through the metaphor of theatrical practice: that with literature, one can always return to the beginning and start over. We readers can’t do that with our environment, but Lindsey Drager has offered us a model for how we might live as if we could.

The Avian Hourglass
Lindsey Drager
Dzanc Books
2024
$17.95
212 pp.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.