“Isabel often thinks of Amsterdam, though she has never been there, and probably never will go”: this is the first sentence of Glaciers, and pretty representative of the whole book’s tone: it’s a story about longing, partly for romance and connection, partly for the past (real or imagined), partly for a life rooted in and linked to a particular place. It’s a short book, told in vignettes: we hear about a day in twenty-something-year-old Isabel’s life in Portland (Oregon, not Maine) (working in preservation at the library, crushing on a co-worker who is an Iraq war vet, shopping for a vintage dress), but we also hear about her childhood in Alaska (a rural idyll, the harshness of her father’s work in the North Slope oil field, her parents’ divorce).
Glaciers is more about prose style and mood and character than about plot, and there are some really lovely passages and sentences, particularly some of the descriptions of Portland, like this:
The sun has set behind the city, all shadows against what’s left of the light. The last wash of dusk behind the west hills and all the smaller lights (the rooftop gardens and office windows and neon signs) shimmering drunkenly in the river. (153)
Or this: “Downtown in the morning, everyone moving, the trees listing, the bricks and green speckled with pigeons and starlings” (35).
Or this:
A slick fog of a city in the winter, drenched in itself. In the spring and summer: leafy, undulating green, humming with bicycles, breeze-borne seeds whirling by like tiny white galaxies. And in the early glorious days of fall, she thinks, looking around her, chill mist in the mornings, bright sunshine and halos of gold and amber for every tree. (13)
Sometimes the writing struck me as clunky or overdone (as in this description of an old postcard: “The picture has a Technicolor glow, the colors hovering over the scene rather than inhabiting it,” (11)) and Isabel sometimes struck me as too twee (with her “mismatched teacups and saucers,” “faded aprons,” “Vera tea towels,” etc. (24)). There were also a few typos/editing errors/moments of grammatical weirdness that I found distracting, as when Isabel’s coworker is described as “wanting to be grow apples” (138) or a dress is described as “too small for either of her mother or her aunt to wear” (94), or a postcard has four totem poles on it but then later (I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be the same postcard) it’s described as having three. But these are pretty minor quibbles, and the precious/twee moments diminished as the book continued (or maybe I just noticed them less).
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