ABC
by David Plante
Summary
From National Book Award finalist David Plante comes his first novel in a decade: a luminous work that explores the reaches and definitions of grief as it follows a trio of people who, in the face of devastating losses of children and spouses, become obsessed with the meaning and order of the alphabet.
Exquisitely written, ABC compellingly illuminates the force of grief, the pull of language, the role of culture and history in understanding violence, and the tenuous, essential relationship between the living and the dead. It is a powerful work from a master of character and narrative, a writer whose radiant prose draws the reader into wholly new worlds of understanding.
Excerpt
From the canoe, stilled on the still cove of the lake, the land was reflected in detail in the water: branches and leaves and pinecones, berry bushes, and the stone-and-timber house on the steep bank among trees. The house was abandoned. For all the ten years Gerard had been spending his summers on the other side of the lake in the house his wife, Peggy, had inherited from a rich uncle, the cove with the abandoned house overlooking it had been the end of every canoe ride. The cove, as calm and warm and peaceful as it was, instilled in them the calm and warmth and peace that they went out on the water for: Peggy at the front of the canoe, Gerard at the back, their dripping paddles resting lengthwise across the sides, and sitting on a cushion on the bottom halfway between them was their six-year-old son, Harry, who seemed to be in the same drifting state as the canoe, or so Gerard imagined.
For the first time, Gerard was struck by how Harry’s bones, which he had up until now seen as delicate, were beginning to enlarge, his vertebrae pronounced, his shoulder blades almost disproportionately large in the way they stuck out, and yet his shoulders were small and smooth. Harry was motionless, which meant he must have been thinking, drifting, Gerard again imagined, on his thinking. Gerard liked to drift on his thoughts, and his son, he was sure, took enough after him to like to too—that is, until Peggy, as Gerard always counted on her doing, stopped the drifting. She did so now by dipping her paddle into the water, a sign for Gerard to get to it and paddle. He did, and they continued in slow ripples deeper into the cove, towards the abandoned house, some of whose wide, many-paned windows on the second story were broken.
Raising his thin arm with a large elbow, Harry pointed to the house and asked, “Who lives there?”
Not turning, Peggy answered, “No one does.”
“Why doesn’t anyone live there?”
His high voice sounded in the silence like one of the natural sounds of the lake, a heat bug trilling or a bird flying overhead.
Gerard said, “Harry, here we go with your question why again. I’d like to answer, but I have to tell you I don’t know why.”
“Did the people who lived there die?”
Turning her head a little, so the thick bunch of her frizzy, tied-back hair swung against her bare shoulders, Peggy said, “No, they didn’t die.”
“How do you know?”
Amused, Gerard also wanted to ask how she knew.
“I just know.”
As a matter of simple fact, Harry said, “You just know a lot of things.”
“I do.”
“I wish I knew a lot of things.”
“You will, darling. You’ll know a whole lot of things.”
“I want to know everything.”
“That’s not possible,” his mother said. “You can know this and that, you can know a whole lot, but you can’t know everything. Everything is too much to know.”
“But that’s what I want.”
“Well, I hope you get what you want, darling. I do.”
Peggy again rested the paddle across the canoe, and Gerard did, and again the canoe drifted, now among water-lily pads that made a slurring sound along its thin bottom; and Harry, silent, seemed to Gerard to be once more drifting in his mind.
Below the abandoned house was a rotted dock, the remaining weathered boards tilting into the water.
Harry suddenly asked, “Can’t we go see the house?”
“No,” Peggy said abruptly.
“Why not?”
Copyright © 2007 by David Plante Reprinted by permission of Random House Inc.
Reviews
“The novel’s ending…is as lovely and haunting as are its stunning opening chapters…beautifully written” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Plante] is serious, intelligent and convincing, and is always worth reading”—The Washington Post
“[In The Country] Plante has created one of the most harrowing of contemporary novels.” —Phillip Roth
Author's Biography
David Plante is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the acclaimed Francoeur trilogy: The Family (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Woods, and The Country. He is also the author of Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three, and of American Ghosts. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. He teaches at Columbia University and divides his time between New York and London.