[Dzanc Books; 2024]
In 2020, more humans paid attention to birds than ever before. The year of lockdowns, social distancing, and political division was also the year of doomscrolling, doombaking, and yes, doombirding. Despite being stuck inside, we could still experience the northern cardinal’s eye-catching red or the common grackle’s grouchy squeak. Watching and listening to birds became a form of freedom, and relief, for many. Four years later—with one crisis piling on top of another, ranging from extreme weather events to record levels of loneliness—over a third of Americans over sixteen are now birders. One could say that crisis compels us to look up, beyond ourselves. And birds allow us to delight in the altitude while staying rooted to the ground.
Lindsey Drager’s latest novel, The Avian Hourglass, unfolds within a world recognizable as a surreal, kaleidoscopic culmination of our contemporary moment. Social isolation joins with political division and climate apocalypse to create the haunting sense that we have both lived this reality already and have yet to live it. Drager embeds this both/and temporality directly in The Avian Hourglass’s structure. The novel is composed of 180 discrete sections which proceed from 180 down to 1, with the novel’s final line in 1 repeating the novel’s first line in 180. The narrator relays events circularly, returning to the past in order to connect it to the diegetic present. Only once one reads to the end (which is also the beginning) does the entire book’s shape form. Indeed, the novel travels through diegetic time like a planet’s orbit, rotating around its axis to complete a day (i.e., a section) and revolving around the sun to complete a year (i.e., the book). A planet’s orbit, and this novel, end right where they began. Afterall, as the characters remind each other: 180 degrees is both a line and a half-circle. Drager thus asks us to read The Avian Hourglass by holding seeming opposites in each hand. This novel is fiction. This novel is true. This novel is the future. This novel is the present.
Due to its looping, even mathematical, nature that serves to question cause and effect, The Avian Hourglass’s plot evades straightforward summation. But if the novel has a straightforward plot, it’s this: the unnamed female narrator is trapped within a small town where the sky has become so choked with smog that there are no stars, and all the birds have disappeared. The town’s young adults regularly participate in The Demonstration, in which many argue for the YES side and many argue for the NO side at the community center every Saturday. The Crisis, the narrator tells us, has come to its tipping point: “The truth is I believe we are all really hurting because of The Crisis, especially since the last bird disappeared. I believe when we reached the end of birds—birds, whose genetic code outlived dinosaurs—people realized we were at the precipice of a whole new paradigm of being.”
This new paradigm of being is best characterized by an obstructed longing to connect, console, and rebuild. When human-sized replicas of bird nests begin to appear in the town, for instance, the narrator and her neighbor Sulien find each other congregating at the nests. Here, by mourning the hummingbirds and yellow warblers, the weaverbirds and albatross, they mourn all the losses that they can’t quite articulate. The narrator knows that Sulien lost his partner to “that gap into the mental healthcare system,” the same one that took her own father, whose depression and apparent delirium doctors couldn’t treat. Since the narrator and Sulien can’t talk about the humans they lost, they allow their grief to form on the edge of the nest replicas. As they stare at an albatross nest replica one afternoon, the narrator feels questions building but keeps them tucked within her. Sulien fills the silence by describing birds’ ability to hear and see far more than we can. “There are so many ways humans cannot sense the world and its complex, interconnected patterns,” says Sulien. “Now, without birds, we may never understand.” A loved one, a species, a way of being: what we’ve lost, we’ve lost forever.
As the narrator and the town learn to face their grief, they make hard-won transitions from alienation to connection. The narrator and Sulien congregate again and again at the nest replicas, their comfort with vulnerability gathering each time they do so. And once the town finds a shared purpose, thanks to a scavenger hunt of sorts, the binaries of YES and NO eventually form a collective of MAYBE. With only one member of YES and one member of NO remaining by novel’s end, and the narrator showing up out of habit, the three sit on the curb and eat ice cream. This peaceful activity makes space for the YES and NO sides to discuss what the other side gets right. Together, they find the middle path.
The novel’s most ingenious reflection on our contemporary moment, though, comes by way of its exploration of the real and the artificial through doubles and triples. The narrator gives birth to triplets, having served as a gestational surrogate for a couple in town in order to save up for a degree in radio astronomy. The couple’s death in a car accident prompts the narrator to assume legal guardianship of and raise the triplets in a duplex with Uri, the triplets’ uncle by blood. Uri—a middle-aged insurance agent who left his job to care for the triplets and write a play about Icarus—wears a set of wire wings. Whether rehearing as Icarus or drinking beer as himself, the wings remain fastened to his back and, like a bowerbird’s nest, slowly accrue the trinkets he stores within them. The wings were made by the narrator’s aunt, Luce: the twin of the narrator’s father and the daughter of two fathers who made globe replicas for a living, and the gray jumpsuit-wearing etymology-lover who works at The Factory (previously: The Farm). Amidst this head-spinning multiplicity, we also get nothingness. The narrator loses her job as the bus driver of Route 0 to a self-automated model. She watches the bus she once drove circle the town, now driven by no one.
And so, the tipping point evoked by the narrator at novel’s beginning starts to tip toward an end. But in this novel of both/and, an end is also a beginning. Plagued by déjà vu and obsessed with rewinding analogue tapes, the narrator considers whether it’s possible to turn back time. She often sits on the duplex porch as Uri, decked in his wings, rehearses his Icarus play on the lawn. When he makes a mistake in the middle, he adjusts his wings and starts from the beginning. Uri tells her that rehearsal’s magic is its ability to erase your errors, which she considers to be a feature of narrative. These nights watching Uri’s rehearsals meld with her fears that there’s no turning back from The Crisis, and her thoughts repeatedly circle back to where endings end and beginnings begin. Where, for that matter, do beginnings end and endings begin? “The order is wrong, always has been,” notes the narrator. “First it is the end and then the middle. It’s only after that—only after the end and the middle when everything begins.”
Is it so bad to return to where you began? Not for the narrator, and certainly not for Drager. The space of return—the space between endings and beginnings—is where one can move backwards in order to move forwards again, doubling, tripling, multiplying again and again until something vital comes to light through the repetition. The Crisis is not one crisis, realizes the narrator, but multiple crises: one for each person who grapples with how to endure while the Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable for a diversity of lifeforms and their ways of knowing and being. We cannot make those lost come back. We cannot turn back time. But perhaps, the narrator tells us, we can still change the direction of events: “Making believe you could [change the world]—that is how the change began. By tricking yourself into believing you were the narrator of your own story and because of that, you could initiate change—to the setting and the conflict and the end.” In a novel concerned with the end of the world, the chance to connect and reflect—maybe even look up to whatever is still there—is the closest thing we have to a hero.
Elizabeth McNeill is a writer, editor, and bird lover living in the Midwest. As a Daily Editor at the Chicago Review of Books, she runs the feature series, “Checking out Historical Chicago.” Her writing can also be found in Electric Literature, Oh Reader, Cleveland Review of Books, and Hopscotch Translation. You can find her book musings at her website, www.elizabethamcneill.com.
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