An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky

June 17, 2013
Slipping through time, reality, and fantasy, this inspired novel from Beachy-Quick (A Whaler’s Dictionary) tells the story of Daniel, a college professor adrift in a sea of narratives. “The story has lost its order,” Daniel laments early in the novel, referring both to an autobiographical tome he is attempting to write and to the way he recalls his own bygone experiences: the deaths of his mother and newborn sister, his father’s unhealthy obsession with myth, and his own doomed relationship with Lydia, the love of his life. Under Beachy-Quick’s expert hand, Daniel zigzags across a nonlinear history, occasionally stopping to address elements of classics by authors like Melville, Hawthorne, and Emerson, and to comment on the fairy tales contained within Wonders and Tales, a green leather-bound book that haunted his childhood. Driven by images of pearls, sleeping giants, whales, and volcanoes, Daniel searches for the truth of life while acknowledging the failures of memory; yet his character, shaped by a troubling childhood, is left impenetrable, and he is unable to experience simple pleasures and relationships. As a result, Daniel often rambles, and the outcome is a strange, yet rewarding, experience.

Starred review from August 15, 2013
A marvelous novel, by turns lyrical, realistic, dreamlike, and philosophical but always intelligent and gorgeously written. The narrative opens at an academic cocktail party, with all the pretension that such a party traditionally entails. In his wandering away from the action, Daniel, the narrator, comes across a copy of Wonders and Tales, a book that had meant much to him as a child, at least in part because his father had forbidden him to read it. The book becomes both a catalyst for Daniel's memory and an inspiration for his own struggles as a novelist trying to complete a manuscript (not coincidentally entitled An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky). Beachy-Quick periodically returns us to Daniel's life as an academic, with his various literary loves (especially Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson). In one splendid episode, Daniel substitutes for an indisposed friend and teaches a class on its final day of discussing Moby-Dick. Daniel shows himself to be, like Ahab, obsessed, though Daniel's obsession is with the beauty and power of the novel. (At the end of the class, one of the students, a boy Daniel ultimately suspects might be his own son, comes up and introduces himself as Ishmael.) But Daniel's academic career is only one of the narrative threads Beachy-Quick deftly weaves together. We also learn of Daniel's relationship with Lydia, a physicist who loves and challenges him, of the elusive Pearl and her mother (an artful allusion to Hawthorne), and of his contentious ambivalence toward his father. Throughout the story, the narrator explores the philosophical ramifications of the self, of the slippery "I" who makes statements about the truths and distortions of fiction. Accomplished, self-assured and engaging.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2013

Novels written by poets (e.g., Michael Ondaatje, Muriel Rukeyser, Denis Johnson) tend to lean toward less linear narratives, which makes for tricky reading. However, the images evoked and the compelling strength of their voices can be exhilarating. Beachy-Quick (English, Colorado State Univ.; Circle's Apprentice) debuts an oblique but beautiful work, in which we follow the thoughts of Daniel, a literature professor haunted by the book his father left behind. Daniel is struggling with writing his own book when he begins dating physicist Lydia. Then there's Pearl, the girl below the floorboards. Plot questions soon arise: What's real here? What does Daniel's obsession with Moby-Dick mean? Better maybe simply to enjoy the spell created by Beachy-Quick's sentences: "To learn how to speak is to learn how to be in the world--not in the day, but the world past the limits of the day, the old world that doesn't exist in time, the world in which nothing has been lost, the heroic world of monsters and gods. The singer's world." VERDICT Readers with a taste for adult fairy tales will want to experience this realm. [See Prepub Alert, 6/17/13.]--Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., Gainesville, FL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.