Title: The Field is White: a Novel
Author: Claire Åkebrand
Kernpunct Press, 2017
2017 AML Novel award finalist
Reviewed by John Bennion, October 4, 2018
Åkebrand’s novel renders the domestic exotic: an off-the-rails Mormon missionary becomes snowbound inside a house near a Swedish village with a woman his mother’s age and another his grandmother’s age. Every room is full of memories that are not his own.
The story, like most good stories, begins simply: John Eliason, the missionary, abandons his duties after a friend dies, a man he has converted to Mormonism. The missionary travels by train away from his assigned area and companion to the old man’s former home, supposedly to talk about the funeral with the wife and daughter, who were abandoned a decade earlier. After that simple beginning, the novel opens like a chess game, with moves that quickly become complex as the young man tries to relate to the others in the household, the living and the dead. His friend’s daughter provides reluctant hospitality while the train track is cleared of an enormous snowstorm. Trapped inside this domestic space, he discovers that time moves differently, cyclically, with repeated actions acting as ticks in a slow clock—cooking, eating, cleaning, sleeping, dreaming.
The situation fits both of Tolstoy’s main fictional narratives—a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. In this case the journey is transgressive; once leaving his mission, John can’t go back. Another kind of story takes over—a domestic novel, where the characters stay home. For much of the world’s history, women send their men on a journey or welcome the stranger, because someone always has to stay put, taking care of home and family. Bound in the old house, the lapsed missionary, a sensitive and empathetic protagonist, broods about the lives of the two women who were abandoned by his friend. It makes sense that the story of the women who stay at home must be conditioned by non-linear time. Time hesitates, nearly still, so “changes come about quietly like curtains slowly bleached in the sunlight.” Åkebrand’s narrative gains tension as it pools and eddies, moving in circular, rhythmic time.
Because of the closed space, the tensions are amplified between the young man and his dead friend, who was an erstwhile poet, his senile wife, and his daughter who has not rid herself of anger. John’s imagination also engages with someone from outside the home, a woman from the nearby village that he first met on the train. She is forty, engaged to an older man, while the missionary is twenty. His yearning for her is made powerful by repression. When they are together, he watches her obsessively:
The immense beech trees creaked. A breeze swept through the leaves and inflated her gown at the bottom. Standing there, he felt like they were the only guests at a wedding without a bride or groom or music. The breeze soared again. Sunshine pulsed in her irises. She held on to her hair and gown and squealed. She vaguely resembled something beautiful to him. When the wind calmed, the trees stood motionless and a white owl passed overhead, a rustling like the silken train of a dress across floorboards.
Some linear actions ground the novel’s lyricism: John types the poet’s work, a task that has a beginning and an end, the snow will eventually be cleared and he will have to leave the house. However, much in the novel is not linear, the domestic tasks repeat and his friend’s poems, reread as he types them, evoke memories; these acts force the lines of narrative to curl and flow backward.
As is hopefully already clear, this lyrical structure works because the language is so lovely. Åkebrand, who also publishes poetry, describes the people as “ghost-white actors with raccoon eyes [who] use exaggerated gestures.” As the missionary looks out the window, “The tree outside bends and sheds a heavy load of snow that bursts and becomes blue air.” Many sentences create elegant metaphors for time: “She is so heavy that it seems to John that they are carrying her dementia, too, her calcified sorrow, time itself within her bones.” While most of the chapters are paragraphed, some short chapters are delineated as poetry or set apart from the prose narrative:
Frightened of eternity
Even god is bound by the days
that keep falling.
Or maybe eternity is a shadow of time. A long, drawn-out
shadow. A grainy outline pouring forth toward a white horizon. What is this light obstructed by time?
While the novel seems set in a timeless space, internal markers, including reference to the flight of Sputnik I, set the time as late 50s, but not much has changed in this rural village. In this traditional realm of women, the home, John experiences disorientation as he takes the place of the female protagonist in such nineteenth-century domestic novels such as the works of Austen and the Bronte sisters, where the woman is trapped by convention in the home of a more powerful male. Many contemporary domestic novels have also attempted this kind of feminist reversal, but while the personal may be the political, it would be a stretch to say this is a politicized novel. Åkebrand’s observational skills endow this world and these people with incredible richness: the snow burying everything, the voice of an old woman trapped in the past, the smell of wood smoke and food, the rustling of pages of manuscript poems, the impending marriage between the woman he has grown to love and an older man that she respects but doesn’t love.
In an interview Åkebrand told me that some influences are Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, which she described in language that could apply to her own novel:“highly evocative, surreal ordinary images, painterly, cinematographic in its descriptions . . . , concise, atmospheric, moody. Longing is almost a main character.” Other influences are Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping—“the way she transforms a simple household into a dramatic, dynamic world where subtle changes feel momentous,” and filmmaker Tarkovsky, “especially The Atonement.”
I read this novel a while ago, but it is still inside me. Åkebrand’s vision of relationships and time is infectious, a virus that affects how readers will see not just the world of this novel but also of any world that they might inhabit. Its evocation of life is so clear that it has changed the way I see my own family, my own home.