Afloat
By Jennifer McCartney, Hamish Hamilton Publishers, 2007, 244 pages, $29
I picked up Afloat because it had a bicycle on the front cover (an old-fashioned woman's model with a wicker handlebar basket), and was drawn in by the fact that the story centres around a summer spent on Mackinac Island, Michigan. Located in Lake Huron, Mackinac Island is one of the very few places in North America that doesn't allow cars.
In alternating chapters, the story takes the reader back and forth between the summer of a young university student named Bell working as a waitress at an exclusive Mackinac restaurant - a summer that we soon learn has shaped Bell's entire existence - and a minute-by-minute unfolding of a single day in the life of a widowed Bell 50 years later as she awaits a visitor from her Mackinac summer.
Part coming-of-age story and part dark science fiction, McCartney situates Bell's Mackinac self in the early 21st century, while her older self lives in an apocalyptic future.
On Mackinac Island "everything is calm, green, the water is everywhere. There are no traffic lights and no exhaust fumes and no daily headlines save the weekly Town Crier and nothing is fast enough to be a problem."
Described in sparse but evocative language, this idyllic location is the backdrop to Bell's intense romance with an excommunicated Mormon with a dark secret, and to the loss of innocence through a tragic death.
Looking back, the older Bell describes in a few words the changes that half a century have brought: "It was the beginning of a new century then, before the weather had taken over, the skies yellowed, before New York and everything after. Before the clashes of fundamentalists within our own borders, before my sickness and Alan's death."
In this bleak future, deadly storms known as Rapid Weather Patterns (known simply as RWPs) that leave "holes punched through cars and roofs by hailstones" have become a part of life.
The story of the Mackinac summer builds to a climax that parallels the development of the RWP that is brewing as Bell recounts her Mackinac summer. Finally, through her reunion with an old friend, we come to understand the heartbreak that Bell has carried for so many years from the summer that was "built out of bicycle grease and pine gum and horseshit and the paper frail dreams of youth."
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