Paint the Bird

June 3, 2013
Packard’s note to the reader at the end of the novel on the book’s typography serves to illuminate her attention to aesthetic detail throughout. The story reads like a prose poem—emotional significance comes across in the sparsely told daily machinations of the lives of a few intentionally but tenuously connected New Yorkers. Sarah is a lapsed minister, experiencing a mortal-world version of limbo. Adrift from her religion and her marriage, and increasingly irrelevant in her grown-up daughter’s life, she is aimlessly, persistently looking for something to hold onto. She clings to moments, recorded in joyful and precise detail, like a single meal at a dimly lit restaurant, or an encounter with a strange man. When she meets Abraham Darby, a gruff but sensuous artist, she willingly steps into his life, leaving hers behind for a night that turns into a weekend, and then merges into something more difficult to extricate herself from. Packard (Fall Asleep Forgetting) weaves a dreamy yet well-paced narrative with richly developed characters who gradually come to discover that life is always going on—whether they’re watching or not.