The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson WalkerRandom House, 2012

I really like the premise of The Age of Miracles: it’s set in California in the not-too-distant future, and the world is not so different from ours, except for one thing, one big thing: the rotation of the planet has started slowing down. The Age of Miracles is partly the story of the slowing, as it comes to be called, but it’s also the story of its narrator, Julia, who’s telling the story looking back from her twenties to the year she was eleven turning twelve, the year the slowing started, the year she became differently aware of the adult world in various ways (an affair, a death, sickness, the threat of disaster, but also more mundane things: how friendships end, how love starts). I like the style of Thompson’s writing, too, the way it blends the matter-of-fact with sharply-observed little details, like this, about the day the slowing was announced on the news:

“We have no way of knowing if this trend will continue,” said a shy bearded scientist at a hastily arranged press conference, now infamous. He cleared his throat and swallowed. Cameras flashed in his eyes. Then came the moment, replayed so often afterward that the particular cadences of that scientist’s speech—the dips and the pauses and that slight midwestern slant—would be forever married to the news itself. He went on: “But we suspect that it will continue.” (4)

And the slowing does continue: the day it’s announced is fifty-six minutes longer than the one before, not long enough to have much impact, but as the days keep going (passing thirty hours long, then fifty, then sixty, then seventy-two) the effects are more extreme. When the length of a day passes thirty hours, the governments in the US and elsewhere decree that their citizens will stay on the twenty-four hour clock regardless: this is interesting for the way it divides the populace into people who agree and people who don’t, with people who don’t going off to form their own communities on the fringes, continuing to live by the sun, hoping their circadian rhythms will adapt.

The slowing aside, the other highlight of the book for me is how Julia is on the edge of childhood, growing up: how her own growing maturity shows in the way she observes and describes the adults around her. There’s this passage, about her father:

What went on in that head of his? I would soon come to understand that he gave voice to only a fraction of the thoughts that swam behind his eyes. It was not nearly so clean and smooth in there as it seemed. Other lives were housed in that mind, parallel worlds. Maybe we’re all built a little bit that way. But most of us drop hints. Most of us leave clues. My father was more careful. (88-89)

Or this, about her friend/crush Seth’s dad:

Seth’s father was frequently at his lab. He left home early. He came home late. He was the coffee cup in the kitchen sink, the cigarettes in the ashtray out back, the lab coat slung over the banister. He was a name on the envelopes that piled, unopened, in a huge stack by the door, a voice on the phone instructing Seth to order pizza, eat without him. (225-226)

Because the last book I read was nonfiction that I found fairly long and fairly dry, this book felt incredibly refreshing to me: mm, a book with characters and interiority and sentences that flow. Also, I’m such a sucker for writing like this, on love and loss and hope:

I’ve become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in a while, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it’s finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I’m always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone. (269)