Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2005 Book Reviews

 

Light on Snow by Anita Shreve

 

Rating: (Mildly Recommended)

 

 

 

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Melodramatic

 

If you think of Anita Shreve’s novel, Light on Snow, as a screenplay for a made-for–TV movie, your pleasure in reading it may rise. As in some of her earlier works, Shreve sets up characters facing tragedy in their lives, and finding ways to move one. The beginning of Light on Snow has the narrator, Nicky Dillon, at age 30 reflecting back on a life transforming experience from age 12: when she and her father found a baby abandoned on the snow in the woods behind their New Hampshire home. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 60-70:

 

When we return to the house, my father calls Dr. Gib­son. I hang around in the den so that I can hear him in the kitchen.

“I just wondered how the baby was doing,” I hear my father say into the phone.

“That’s good, right?” my father says.

“Where is she now?” he asks.

“She’ll be there how long?.

“Does she have a name yet?

“Baby Doris,” my father repeats. He sounds surprised, taken aback. “You say she’ll go into foster care?...

It seems so Dr. Gibson must make a comment about foster care and adoption, because my father says, “Yes, cold.” I can hear my father pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“When the system doesn’t work, what happens?...

“She’d be prosecuted, though.

“Thanks,” my father says. “I just wanted to know that the baby was okay.”

My father hangs up the phone. I move into the kitchen. He’s sipping the lukewarm coffee and looking out the kitchen window. “Hey,” he says when he hears me.

“She’s all right?” I ask.

     “She’s fine.”

“They’ve named her Baby Doris?”

“Apparently.” He sets the mug down. “Going to Sweet­ser’s,” he says. “Want to come?”

I don’t have to be asked twice to accompany my father on a trip to town.

 

 

My father holds the door for me when we enter the hard­ware store. Mr. Sweetser looks up from the paper he has spread across the counter next to the register. “Our local hero,” he says.

“You heard,” my father says.

“Front page. See for yourself.”

My father and I make our way to the counter. In a newspaper known for its high-school sports news, Sun­day comics, and coupons, I can see a headline that reads INFANT FOUND IN SNOW Below that is another, smaller headline: Local Carpenter Finds Baby Alive in Bloody Sleep­ing Bag. I bend closer to the counter and read the paper with my father. The reporter has largely got the story right. There is mention of the motel, the Volvo, and the navy peacoat. There is no mention of me.

“Got your name spelled wrong,” Sweetser says.

“Yeah, I saw that,” my father says. Dylan. It happens all the time. “You want me to cut it out for you?” My father shakes his head. “So what happened?” Sweetser asks.

My father unzips his jacket. The store is heated by a fickle woodstove in the corner that makes the temperature fluctu­ate between ninety degrees and sixty. Today it feels like eighty~ “Nicky and I were taking a walk when we heard a cry,” my father says. “We thought it might be an animal at first. And then we heard the sound of a car door shutting.”

“The baby was in a sleeping bag?” Sweetser asks.

My father nods.

“Weirdest thing,” Sweetser says, smoothing the pink strands of hair over his head. He has recently shaved his beard, revealing a sunken chin and strange pale skin like a new layer on an animal that’s just molted. “You wouldn’t think.”

“No, you wouldn’t think,” my father says.

“It’s like those fairy tales my wife used to read the kids,” Sweetser says. “Carpenter goes into the woods and finds a baby.”

“In a fairy tale it would be a princess,” my father says.

“You should be so lucky,” Sweetser says.

For a hardware store in the no-man’s-land between Hanover and Concord, Sweetser’s carries an impressive array of tools. Sweetser likes their heft and shape, he says, much as my father does. Beyond the shelves of tools are other shelves, of Pyrex dishes, boxes of Miracle-Gro (dusty now in the off-season), and cans of Sherwin-Williams paint. Attached to the store is a smaller, shedlike annex in which Sweetser sells antiques, the word antiques used loosely. Much of the furniture is from the sixties.

“That couple make it up to your place last Friday?” Sweetser asks.

“What couple?”

“I sent some tourists your way when they started asking for a Shaker table. I said you did stuff that looked like Shaker.”

“Never saw them,” my father says.

“Your road is crap,” Sweetser says.

Sweetser has been saying our road is crap ever since we moved into town. For over a year now, he’s been sending people my father’s way. Only a half dozen so far have braved the miserable road, but by the time they make the trek, they almost always buy something.

“I need a level,” my father says.

“What happened to the old one?”

“I cracked the vial.”

“Hard to do.”

 “Yeah. Well.”

My father moves to the shelf of levels. His old level, which worked perfectly well until he knocked the glass vial against the refrigerator, had metal rails. He picks up a wooden level. Some of the vials, I see, are oval, while others are arched. My father points out to me a level that reads in a 360-degree direction.

“Going to Remy’s for a coffee,” Sweetser says, sliding his arm into a yellow plaid jacket. “You want one?”

“No thanks,” my father says.

“ A Drake’s?”

“No, that’s okay. I had breakfast.”

“Nicky, how about you?” Sweetser asks. “You want one?”

“A Drake’s coffee cake?” I ask.

“She wants one,” Sweetser says.

When Sweetser has left the store, I tell my father I need white paint. “I’m skiing Gunstock with Jo after Christmas.”

“How many now?” he asks.

“Seven,” I say, referring to the white peaks of my mural.

“When are you going?” my father asks.

“The day after Christmas.”

“Have you said yes definitely?”

“What’s wrong? Can’t I go?”

Grammie will still be here,” my father says.

“So I can’t go skiing?” I ask, my tone immediately chal­lenging. I can go from zero to all-out rage in less than five seconds now.

“No, you can go,” my father says. “You should ask first is what I’m saying. I might have had plans. We might have been going somewhere.”

“Dad,” I say, my voice notched up to incredulity, “we never go anywhere.”

I pick out a pint of linen white and walk over to study the antiques. There’s a maple bedroom set and a ratty green plaid sofa. A jukebox is in a corner. I wonder if it works.

Sweetser puts his shoulder to the door and enters bear­ing a coffee cup and a Drake’s cake. My father selects the level with the fixed vial. He brings it to the counter and pays for it. With my father’s change, Sweetser gives him a small rectangle of newsprint.

“Cut it out anyway,” Sweetser says.

 

 

My father pulls out of Sweetser’s parking lot, the level and the clipping on my lap. He heads in the direction of home. I take a bite of the Drake’s cake, the crumbs fall­ing down the front of my parka. “Dad,” I say. “We need food.”

“You make a list?”

“No, but we need milk and Cheerios,” I say. “Bread for sandwiches. Bologna. Stuff for dinner.”

“I don’t want to go to Remy’s,” he says. “Enough of the local hero stuff.”

My father does a 180 and heads for Butson’s Market, a store further out of town that he can sometimes get in and out of without running into anyone he knows. We pass the Mobil station and the Shepherd Village School, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1780. The school houses the town’s K—6; the playground is a gravel front yard. Older students are bused out of town to the Regional, a trip that takes, in my case, forty minutes each way.

Beside the school is the Congregational Church, a white clapboarded building with long windows and black shut­ters. The church has a steeply pitched roof and a tower with a bell. Neither my father nor I has ever been inside it.

We pass the three stately homes in town, one after another on a hill, two of which have seen better days. We pass Serenity Carpets, a beige house trailer, the volunteer fire department (Bingo Every Thursday Nite 6:30), and Croydon Realty, to which we drifted in a slow stop the first time we came into town Croydon Realty, where it’s still possible to buy a house for $26,000; not much of a house, but a house. In the summers my father and I some­times go for exploratory drives around the countryside, getting lost on backwoods roads, finding small pockets of surprisingly well tended houses. “How do they make a liv­ing?” my father will always ask. Once we came upon a moose ambling along in front of us, hogging the narrow road. We had to follow it for twenty minutes at five miles an hour, not daring to pass it, learning to like the gentle jog of the animal’s rump.

After Croydon Realty, there are four miles of nothing just woods with a stream that parallels the road. My father slows as he passes Mercy, the first set of buildings after the gap, the hospital housed in what was once a brick, four-story hotel, converted in the 1930s. Though it has since sprouted modern wings, the words De Wolfe Hotel 1898 are still inscribed over the front door of the original building.

“Dad, let’s stop,” I say. “I want to see her.”

My father stares at the hospital. I know that he would like to see the baby, too. But after a few seconds, he shakes his head. “Too much red tape,” he says, accelerating.

Beyond the hospital is a strip mall into which my father turns. He stops in front of a sign that reads Liquor Outlet, Butson’s Market, Family Dollar, Frank Renata D.D.S.

Milk, I think. Cheerios. Coffee. Chicken with Stars. American cheese. Hamburger meat. Maybe some Ring Dings.

 

With a week’s worth of groceries, my father makes the reverse trip past the hospital, through the gap, then the Realtor, the three stately homes, and Remy’s and Sweet­ser’s right across the street from each other. Our own road is six miles out of town. Along the way we pass houses with front porches filled with couches and plastic toys and empty propane tanks. One of these houses is a small white clapboard cottage with a tiny fenced-in backyard. The front porch is neatly crowded with bicycles and tricycles, baseball bats and hockey sticks. Evidence of boys can also be found in the wash on the line: T-shirts in varying sizes, jeans, and hockey shirts or bathing suits depending on the season. In the middle of the wash I sometimes see a bra or a slip or a pretty nightgown. When we drive by in the win­ter, we occasionally see the mother struggling with large, unwieldy frozen sheets. They look like cardboard and blow with the wind. I always wave at the woman, who smiles and waves back. Sometimes in the summers I have an urge to stop my bike and say hello and enter that house and meet the boys and see the chaos I imagine there.

My father pulls the truck into our driveway. “You bought spaghetti?” he asks.

And Ragu sauce, I say.

He parks in his usual spot beside the barn. He turns off the engine. “That okay for supper?”

“It’s fine.”

“I bought Breyers,” he says.

I saw.

“Butter pecan. Your favorite.”

“Dad?” I say.

“What?”

“How did the baby get named Doris?”

My father reaches for his cigarettes, a nervous gesture, but then he decides against it with me in the truck. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe it was the name of one of the nurses.

“It sounds like the name of a hurricane.”

“They probably have a system,” he says.

“You think they get that many babies?”

“I don’t think so. I hope not.”

“It’s an old-fashioned name,” I say. I am leaning against my door. My father has his hand on his door handle, as if he were anxious to get out of the truck.

“It’s a strange name to give a baby these days,” he concedes.

“What will happen to her?” I ask “Did Dr. Gibson tell you?”

“She’ll go into social services,” my father says. He puts his hand on the door handle and opens the door a crack.

“She’ll get a new mother and father and new brothers and sisters.”

“Most likely.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” I say.

“What doesn’t seem right?”

“Us not knowing where she is.”

“That’s the way it has to be, Nicky.” He opens his door, signaling the end of the conversation.

“Dad?” I ask.

“What?”

“Why can’t we have her? We could go get her and have her with us.”

The idea is both appalling and sublime. In my twelve-year-old mind, I have conceived the notion of supplanting one baby with another. As soon as I say the words and catch a glimpse of my father’s face, I see what I’ve done. But as a twelve-year-old will do, I become defensive. “Why not?” I ask with the petulant tone of the aggrieved and misunderstood, a tone I will shortly learn to master. “Didn’t it make you feel like maybe Clara had come back to us? That maybe we’re supposed to have her?”

My father steps out of the truck. He takes a long breath. “No, Nicky, it did not,” he says. “Clara was Clara, and this baby is someone else. She is not ours to have.” He looks over at the barn and then back at me. “Help me get these groceries in the house before the ice cream melts.”

“Dad, it’s twenty out,” I say. “The ice cream isn’t going anywhere.”

But I am saying this to my father’s back. He has shut the door and taken a bag of groceries from the back of the truck. I watch him walk toward the house, grief a hard nut inside his chest.

 

Shreve’s character development in Light on Snow fell short of my expectations, and the emotional tugs were overly melodramatic. If you enjoy coming of age stories, and the processing of grief and search for redemption, you’re likely to get satisfaction in reading Light on Snow.

 

Steve Hopkins, May 25, 2005

 

 

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The recommendation rating for this book appeared

 in the June 2005 issue of Executive Times

 

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