C a r o l  R u b e n s t e i n
Book Review: About Grace

If grace is something you get without necessarily deserving it, then we are all recipients-every day-as Anthony Doerr in his debut novel About Grace, would have us believe.

And a miracle of a first novel it is, (this being the author's first act of grace, perhaps).

What though, does Doerr tell us "about grace?" It's the protagonist's daughter, whose name is Grace. It's in Winkler's recognition of being loved, first by an affectionate mother and quiet but kind father, then in the long string of strangers that come into his adult, battered life, and help him. It's seeing the beautiful in life (despite failing eyesight), loves lost and the hard physical, emotional and spiritual pain he endures. It's being in the presence of a five-year-old who solemnly bows his head, clasps his hands in front of his face and without adult prompting, utters gratitude at the lunch table. It's hope, against all odds-including the horrible premonition dreams-that he can after all, make a life from the volition of his own choices and actions. And it's the courage and strength and perseverance to choose life and love and beauty though seemingly equal forces would contrive to fill his days with thoughts of death, heartbreak and all that is not beautiful.

Doerr's protagonist, David Winkler a Ph.D. meteorologist, vacillates between falling through life, like the snowflakes and raindrops he identifies with and ardently swimming against the current, literally through Carribean ocean waters, icy arctic streams and a flooding gorge that overtakes his home in the Chagrin Valley near Cleveland, Ohio.

But when the Ohio storm comes and the waters rise, Winkler's life is literally swept away-for decades. He runs from everything dear, from dreams and a frightening premonition that his baby daughter Grace, will drown in his arms while struggling to save her from the muddy torrent of the swelling Chagrin River. He's driven by the hope that by not being present, by not mirroring the scene in the dream, he can prevent the tragedy.

Winkler's dreams are real. Since childhood he's seen premonitions come to life. Winkler experiences a different kind of reality, one that transcends time and space. He knows what can happen; what has happened.

And then his journey, nearly two decades worth of moving as far away from Grace as possible, is reversed. The fleeing nearly kills him, but his life is saved… The first among many strangers, nurses him back to a kind of functioning consciousness though it takes nearly twenty years for Winkler to actually "come back to life." Then he experiences being the saviour. And he spends the second half of his life journey trying to find Grace, the daughter everyone thought he'd abandoned but whom he thought he was saving… by leaving.

Doerr's return to the analogies of water in all it's forms repeats the big themes of life; sustaining, redeeming, even mimicking birth. Winkler spends a big part of his life thinking about, predicting, observing and photo-documenting the moment when water vapors turn to snowflakes, all with six arms, but each of them different… from every snowflake that ever formed or will form.

And it is his return to the snowy landscape of his youth, Alaska, in search of Grace, that he turns a corner. He writes a letter to the only living person he hopes may know of her whereabouts, if she is in fact, even alive.

Dear Herman,

I remember reading this pamphlet by Kepler in graduate school, where he mused about why snowflakes each seemed to have their own individual pattern. He said all things in nature appeared to have a key-invisible to us-inside them that contained the blueprint for their exterior, for what they were. The nucleus inside a cell, the germ inside a seed… Kepler went so far as to call it a soul.

Standing out there in our little meadow, watching crystals come down, I can't help but admire the idea; every snowflake with a soul. It makes as much sense as genetics, as anything-more sense, I think, than the notion that snow crystals don't have souls.

You should have seen the ice I used to grow in graduate school-perfect, immaculate little crystals. Little wonders. Out here in the woods crystals break easily, go lopsided under the slightest pressure. But the flakes are magnificent, bigger and more real than they were in the lab, in the way that wild animals make zoo animals seem like shadows.

It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I'd rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven.

Doerr isn't saying snowflakes literally have souls. Rather he sees the crystal as an analogy for human life. I think he's saying "Life" grown in a petrie dish may look perfect, but the real stuff-lopsided as it may be-"is more magnificent, bigger and more real."

Doerr's weaving of Winkler's life story, made of tension between a dream-like state of floating-the wind carrying him along unpredictable currents-and the relentless push through all that is difficult, known and unknown, shapes a picture of what this reader too-has experienced. And with every slip and fall and courageous return of our main character, we stand the chance of redemption, just like Winkler.

And what's on the other side of redemption? Doerr's Winkler would say life. And he doesn't know for sure, but he thinks maybe grace.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Doerr's main character in About Grace, David Winkler, was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska where he was seasonally surrounded by the magical stuff of snow. As a child, Winkler was given a 1931, first edition book of Snow Crystals, by Wilson Bentley. In it were produced thousands of photographic images of snow crystals which mesmerized and influenced Winkler throughout his life.

Doerr also recommends "For more information on snow crystals, visit the excellent site www.snowcrystals.net."

For the child in us all, I recommend not only standing in a snow flurry the next chance you get, but checking out another book as well; author, Kenneth Libbrecht's and photographer, Patricia Rasmussen's book, The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty. In it the author chronicles the observations and thinking about snowflakes, from Medieval times to the present day. From the pages of this 2003, Voyageur Press edition, the US Government derives the images used in their series of snowflake postal stamps and the publisher (Penguin Books), of About Grace, acquired images of snowflakes for the cover art of Doerr's book.

On a final note, GrailWorld reprints for you here, text from the inside front cover of Libbrecht's and Rasmussen's book:

From ten thousand feet above Earth, a snowflake falls. Its journey starts when ice forms around a nucleus of dust and is blown by the winds through clouds where the crystals blossom into tiny ice stars. Because it weighs next to nothing, a snow crystal may take hours to fall-finally landing…