About Grace – Anthony Doerr’s pre-Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

All the Light We Cannot See was such a good novel, it made sense to go back to Doerr’s earlier work and see whether there were other diamonds he had scattered about.  About Grace, both a story about a very weird guy and an allegory about becoming a father, is a diamond, though a diamond in the rough and it is likely, therefore, rough sledding for those who want a book to explain things to them and paradoxically can’t appreciate endless and overly detailed descriptions of how the natural world works.

Becoming a father is a complex, psychologically difficult process.  I was lucky to be part of a group of psychoanalysts who went to a talk back with David Lindsay Abaire after a performance of his play “Rabbit Hole.”  Abaire talked about sitting in class at Julliard and having his teacher tell him to write about what terrifies him.  He remembered thinking, “I’ve got nothing.”  Then he had a child.  Rabbit Hole is a play about a couple who lose a child – and the impact it has on them.  Having a child brings about heights of joy – and depths of terror – terror that is described in excruciating detail in Doerr's book about a long and complicated journey to be able to becoming a parent.

I was ambivalent about having children.  In about 1973 I read a book called The Limits to Growth about the future of the world in which growth occurs exponentially, but our ability to provide resources occurs at a linear rate.  It predicted that we wouldn’t survive past the year 2000.  Based on computer models, the authors decided that we would run out of energy by then – but that if we didn’t, we would have so much pollution that we would suffocate.  After reading that book, I decided that I didn’t want to bring a child into a world that would either leave them stranded to starve or be killed by sludge.  Frankly, though, I suspect this was a cover for a deeper fear – one that is expressed in direct and allegorical forms in this book.

In About Grace, we are introduced to David Winkler, a geeky kid who grows up in Anchorage Alaska.  His primary interest is in snow flakes and he pursues this interest all the way to a Ph.D. in hydrology – the study of water – which he sees as a living force of nature that gets expressed in a myriad of ways, including in the crystalline form of snowflakes.  David also has a special ability.  He has premonitory dreams. These detailed dreams foretell calamities – the first is a man being hit and killed by a bus – that he feels unable to alter when they play out before him in real life. 

David is, throughout the early part of the book, consistently inarticulate about his dreams that predict an event.  We think, at first, that this is because of the trauma of seeing his dreams come to life, but later he continues to be inarticulate in puzzling and even maddening ways.  I think this plays an important role in making the allegory work.  As odd and inarticulate as David is, he is also everyman – or more precisely, everyman’s unconscious – the keeper of dreams – the foreteller of the future – and the part of ourselves that directs our actions in ways that are mystifying to us, precisely because it is an unconscious part of ourselves.  This part is unknown to us, but not solely problematic - it can fuel our most human interactions and can become our closest ally.  

So what is the allegory?  Well, David connects, through one of his premonition dreams, with Sandy, a woman who is married to a deadly dull guy named Warren – a banker who is infertile but doesn’t know it.  David impregnates her – and loves her deeply.  They run away together, have a child named Grace, but then, somehow not surprisingly, David has a dream that, in his attempts to save Grace, she will drown.  He tries, without describing the dream, to get Sandy to move with him away from the house where the dream takes place in order to prevent the events from happening.  Sandy (who also had a premonition dream about meeting David that he knows about – he never tells her his – would be sympathetic, you would think, if he were straightforward with her…) understandably refuses to move for no apparent reason - other than David becoming frantic – so, to save Grace, David runs away.

David and Warren together are, I think, an allegory for the traditional western father.  We work hard (as the Warren parts of ourselves) at a job that is dull, and retreat from the family (Warren plays hockey, which frees Sandy up to have an affair with David that Warren is unaware of).  We do this because we fear the ways in which our closeness might be damaging to our children (and our spouses).  David represents the part of us – the weird, wacky, not very traditionally male part that is a bit crazy – that actually deeply desires a connection with our children – that can’t believe we have been graced with them, and that wants to spend every waking minute admiring every aspect of them – David notices everything about Grace, just as he did about Sandy.  But this closeness feels dangerous – we fear that we will drown our children (the hydrologist’s fear) with our love (I think it is also important that water is frequently used as a symbol of the unconscious).  So we run away to the office and leave the parenting to the women.  When the kid grows up and lands on the analyst’s couch, he will complain about her ruining his life – not me; I did my part; I brought home the bacon and paid for everything; I didn’t drown him.

I have always had a fear of heights.  I have never read this in Freud, but remember being told long before I was an analyst, perhaps by a family member, that Freud said that we don’t fear falling, but jumping, and that has always rung true to me.  So one evening when my son was small enough to ride on my shoulders, he was doing just that as we walked across a high and wide bridge over a river.  I became aware of the sucking feeling – the fear that I would fall – or jump – off the bridge.  Well, if it’s just me, the edge of that fear can actually be an interesting, even exciting edge to ride.  But when my son’s life was at stake, I suddenly became terrified.  Just because I wanted to kill myself was no reason for him to die (if the impact didn't kill him he would surely drown), and I felt like I could not control myself (objectively a pretty irrational fear), and was flat out terrified.  We were walking with a group of people – maybe a festival was going on, and the bridge was closed to traffic.  I made my way to the center of the bridge where I felt only marginally safer.  I, like David, didn’t let anyone know about my inner turmoil.  I didn’t ask for help.  I simply did the best that I could to manage the situation and my terror and got my son safely to the other side – and I’m almost certain no one noticed anything particularly peculiar about what was going on – other than maybe my breaking out in a sweat that, on a hot summer evening, could be attributed to the stroll and to carrying a child.

David runs as far away from Sandy and Grace as he can – he takes a freighter and gets off on a random island – it happens to be the island from which Alexander Hamilton started his rise to fame – and there becomes homeless and destitute.  He does not know what has become of Grace.  Taken in by the post lady, he cares for her daughter Naaliyah, about whom, when she becomes a teenager, he has a premonitory dream.  This time, though, he finally tells someone – the butcher – and the butcher convinces him that – as the butcher presumes was the case for Grace because David ran away (neither David nor the reader know if this is the case), he can do something to prevent the dream about Naaliyah from reaching its awful conclusion (a dream in which Naaliyah will drown).  Now David becomes a stalker – following Naaliyah everywhere (without telling her about the specifics of his dream - just asking a budding marine biologist to avoid boats which she, not surprisingly, does not do) and camping out across the street from her apartment.  He is joined there by Naaliyah’s mother who joins him in taking shifts to keep an eye on Naaliyah.  Creepy.

Can we alter fate?  Can I keep the world from running out of resources or becoming polluted?  (A junior high school science fair project involved engineering solar powered cars…)  More realistically, can I avoid visiting the horrors (OK, I’m being overly dramatic) that my parents visited on me on my children?  For instance, my Dad was a travelling salesman who worked for big corporations.  He was out of town two or three nights every week and we moved frequently when I was a child.  To “fix” this problem, I made sure to get a secure job (I have tenure) at a University which won't necessitate my being transferred, nor will I be on the road.  You’d think that my child would have a very different experience.  But when his mother and I divorced, he was suddenly in one or the other of our homes half of every week.  Both of his parents were “away” half of the time and, though he has not moved from city to city, he has moved from house to house every week.  In some ways this, as profound a re-creation and complication of my childhood as this may be, is a very surface difficulty.  There are much deeper and more troubling perils that lurk in trying not to visit on our children the terrible things we are capable of visiting.

David saved Grace by running away, but this had a terrible impact on her.  She became deeply and powerfully angry with him.  When he tries to reconnect with her (the book starts with this journey, flashes back to set it up, then resumes the journey 200 pages later), she wants nothing to do with him.  Ultimately he makes peace with Warren (a surprisingly easy thing for them to do and, in the allegory, something that makes more sense than in life) and helps Warren care for his grandson – actually takes that over from the guy who couldn’t be bothered by kids and connections.  In the tremendously powerful conclusion to the story, David is able to use his premonition to prove his steadfastness to Grace and thereby create a new bond with her.

I think we all want to be able to be connected with our children.  We struggle to do this, however.  We fear the ways that the world will harm them, but even more, we fear that our contact will somehow damage them – that they will drown in what we would offer them.  So we wall ourselves off from them by walling ourselves from ourselves (Warren and David are depicted as two separate people, disconnected from each other who, when they finally meet up, are friendly enough, but realistically have few shared interests) and more directly from them ( Warren escapes into work, David simply disappears).  At some point, if we are lucky (after 200 pages or so), our unconscious wakes up and propels us into connecting with those we love.  If we let it, it will be persistent (and erratic – the tale of David searching for Grace Winkler hither, thither and yon is a wonderful and disorienting odyssey that leads him, seemingly quite by accident, to the only logical place to be).  We may be old – and we may have lived through a number of near death experiences (our unconscious may, like David, have been all but starved, drowned and lost in the wilderness before being subjected to a deep freeze which finally allows for some clarity), but, should we survive, which, surprisingly we often do, our with to connect will out and it will take our now shaggy selves into the world of connection – which we will still do awkwardly, but lovingly.  Or at least Doerr would have us believe that – and I certainly think that we hope this is how things will work out.

So, this book works, at least for me, on the level of a case study.  David is reminiscent of many, many patients – I have never treated a hydrologist, but he could be a lawyer, physician, research scientist of another stripe, artist, or engineer I have treated.  Each of the many Davids that I have worked with has an intense and powerful interest in some aspect of the world.  This interest is incredibly compelling to them, but can be dull as dishwater to those around them.  Indeed, especially early in the treatment, I sometimes have to fight boredom as I listen to these men.  Their outer worlds can be quite circumscribed, but as they open up, I become fascinated – and frankly so do they.  And as that happens, interestingly, they also become fascinating to others – at least to some others.  Like  a snowflake, they are a particular crystalline form of water that is unique and beautiful.

This book, on the level of a case study, is not for everyone.  There are only so many allusions to water in all its forms – and only so many false starts and periods of deprivation - that some readers will be able to stomach.  Many will put this book down, stultified and mystified by this guy who is rendered in such exquisite – though they will experience it as excruciating - detail.  If that reader can hang in there, they may (or may not) be rewarded by enjoying the beautiful symmetry that emerges – by seeing the structure of a person, a family, a universe.  When I present cases of such men to a professional audience, despite my enthusiasm, many feel it is like watching paint dry and turn away.

On the level of allegory, this book is not about one of those guys but about all of us (or maybe I, as the reluctant but obsessed psychoanalyst, am just the quintessential camper). In so far as it focuses, though, on our role as parent, it is parallel to two developments within psychoanalysis.  The first is that we have moved from focusing on the child’s role in the family drama – the murderous wishes that arise out of the Oedipal complex as something the child must work to resolve – to the parent’s part in that drama – our wish to murder our child (one way of reading David’s premonition dreams – as wishes rather than fears) as something that we must work to resolve.  The second is the parallel of moving from focusing only on the patient’s experience of the analysis to recognizing that there are two minds (and two unconscious processes) at work in the psychoanalytic relationship – and we need to understand the psychology of the analyst as well as that of the analysand to understand the interaction between them.

So, the central part of the story that is marginalized by the number of pages devoted to it (maybe 4 of 400 pages are devoted to it - OK, maybe 10, but not many) is the story of David’s relationship with his own parents – and with his mother in particular.  And the larger story hinges – and resolves – in this smaller story – one that could be summed up as the wish to connect – the wish that has driven David’s pursuit of Grace – being formed and resolved in the experience of having had his mother connect - or strive to connect - with him – and his desire to recreate that sense of connection – to achieve that sense of connection in his dreams – dreams that can only occur when we have built a basis in reality to support them.      

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