Cove

February 1, 2018
A man reckons with nature and memory after being struck by lightning at sea.This brief novel, practically a prose poem, by the Welsh novelist Jones (The Long Dry, 2017, etc.) is of a piece with his other fiction, which emphasizes the perils of life uncomfortably close to the elements. Here, an unnamed man sets out in his kayak to perform two tasks: catching fish and scattering his late father's ashes. After the bolt strikes, he's briefly paralyzed from the waist up and unconscious, then adrift far from shore. What ensues is his effort to get back home, as Jones lays out the details of emergency seamanship and the ravages of dehydration and exposure in a kind of slow-motion rhythm. ("You will move only a little and you must not race. Just proceed. That's all it is about.") There are moments of tension, such as a near spotting by a child on a beach, but most often Jones' camera is zoomed in on the man in isolation, where the drama involves attempting to paddle the kayak forward with a frying pan using one functioning arm and dealing with hallucinations of the voices of a child and his father. The man's thoughts scatter, thinking at once of survival and of his pregnant wife back home. ("He wanted to make sure she knew how to reset the pilot light on the boiler.") Jones is a highly talented writer about nature, but here he strives to connect two conflicting rhetorical modes--straightforward survival tale and elegiac riff on loss and mortality--into one overly confining space. Focusing so much on his hero getting on with the simple business of staying alive gives his other themes short shrift.It'd be cruel to wish Jones punished his castaway further, but his tale cries out for a broader canvas.

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February 5, 2018
In this genre-bending novel, Jones (The Long Dry) presents a harrowing tale of resilience. An unnamed man kayaks out into a bay one morning to spread his dead father’s ashes. When a sudden storm rolls in, he is struck by lightning. He awakes with amnesia and severe injuries. Possessing only a limited amount of supplies and the fleeting memory of a woman and child waiting for him to return, he forms a plan to get back to land. Though brief, the book is immersive in its rich, poetic descriptions of nature (“The lightning is not the strike. It is the local effect of the strike. The air around it explodes.”) and cleverly shifts between second and third person. At times the lyricism hurts comprehension with mixed metaphors and awkward similes, but the quick, sharp sentences and use of white space heighten narrative tension. As the protagonist fights the urge to drift away, collides with wildlife, and loses all sense of time, Jones’s narrative becomes increasingly momentous. This is a gripping story with a unique style that reflects the remarkable limits of the human spirit.

March 15, 2018
In what is more an exercise in empathy than a full-throated novel, Jones (Everything I Found on the Beach, 2016) sets the reader adrift with an unnamed narrator who has just been struck by lightning while fishing in a kayak far from shore. The elements available for survival are minimal, as is the narrator's memory, which only flashes to the fore when the motivation to hold on and live runs perilously low. Dolphins swimming near the wayward boat trigger images of a pregnant wife at home. A far-distant shore on the horizon taunts the effort to calculate the mathematical possibility of survival. The action occurs in tight chunks of text that begin to resemble the kayak's steady rocking in the undulating tide, which seems to simultaneously comfort and threaten. Jones echoes other survival narratives by keeping his narrator's voice internal, but he creates a feeling of desperate solitude with wonderfully sparse language. Lovers of poetry and experimental prose will marvel at this impressionistic lament.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)