Title: Glaciers Author: Alexis M. Smith
Published: January 17, 2012
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 174
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.
Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.
By any standard, Glaciers is extremely brief, but Alexis M. Smith knows how to make use of every word. Her prose isn’t wordy, but it’s evocative and poignant, full of gorgeous turns of phrase and mesmerizingly authentic comments on life. It’s story of longing and regret and the Pacific Northwest, all tied together into a brilliant bit of fiction.
The narrative style in this book is approximately stream-of-consciousness, with little dialogue and all of it untagged. The timespan of the story proper is only a few hours, but through clever interweaving of Isabel’s memory and thoughts, Glaciers carries the weight of a much longer novel.
It took a little while, maybe 20 pages or so, before I began to feel that I was really “getting” Smith’s prose and intentions. There is no plot that really rushes up to grab the reader’s attention; nor is there every a moment where Glaciers seems to undertake anything particularly weighty. Rather, the story is subtle, as is Isabel’s characterization and movement through her day and the city, with a just-budding romance between herself and her Iraqi veteran co-worker.
Throughout it all, Smith’s deliciously haunting prose lays everything bare, exposing Isabel’s thoughts and feelings with a light touch. The saddest thing about Glaciers is that it’s so extremely short, but this author’s writing was so graceful that I would have loved to keep reading it for at least another hundred pages. My favorite description, I think, was when Isabel and her co-worker are kissing goodbye, which is very much the climax of the book’s main tension.
It startles her, how warm he is, how much breath the kiss takes. He places his hand on the back of her head and cradles her head in his palm. She reaches for the hem of his shirt, slips beneath it and slides her hand over his belly. She navigates the crenellation of his ribcage slowly until she feels the burst of flesh that must be his scar, soft tender folds around a stippled center, like a pressed flower. He kisses her neck and his beard leaves thousands of tiny abrasions on her skin.
Everything about Glaciers is delicate and poignant, full of subtle meaning. The amount of artistry that Alexis M. Smith shows in so short a novel really speaks to her talent. This book is lovely and sweet, yet leaves the reader with a curious sort of ache at the end.
