About Grace - Anthony Doerr

Another great read.

Doerr, Anthony. About Grace. New York: Scribner, 2004

“He called them dreams. Not auguries or visions exactly, or presentiments or premonitions. Calling them dreams let him edge as close as he could to what they were: sensations—experiences, even—that visited him as he slept and faded after he woke, only to reemerge in the minutes or hours or days to come.” (7)

Not exactly a story about the inevitability of the things that happen to us in life, About Grace nevertheless touches on the themes of fate, chance and the sentiment expressed so well in the paeon by Henley, “Invictus,”ⁱ that we all ponder from time to time. Winkler studies and photographs snowflakes and is amazed that despite them all being different (something we all learned in science class in elementary school), those that fall intact always have six points—not four, never five, always six.

Winkler’s friend, Naaliyah, becomes fascinated with small things as well and studies insects at university in Alaska. What governs the events of insects’ short lives? What governs ours?

And as indicated in the quote above, Winkler’s story turns on his observation that dreams he has—detailed and dramatic—are coming true. For instance, he dreams that a woman in a supermarket line-up will drop an object and he will pick it up. He dreams that a man is run over by a bus. The events happen shortly thereafter, exactly as he dreamed them. 

His conundrum is whether or not the predicted event has to happen, or if he has power to change or prevent it. In this light, the core event of the plot—a dream that their home will be flooded and that he will attempt to carry his young daughter to safety but will accidentally drown her—leads him to run far from home so that the instrument of his daughter’s death in the dream (himself) is not available to fulfill what he dreads.

Unfortunately, being far away in the Caribbean, he’s unable to know whether his flight has saved his daughter or not. The remainder of the story is reminiscent of the picaresque novel (although with relatively little humour) as Winkler begins a search for a lost family through the Caribbean, the contiguous states of the USA, Canada and Alaska. The journey is captivating; the characters encountered along the way memorable.

Because it leans so heavily on the reality of premonitions, many readers may have to suspend disbelief or assume they’re reading what’s called “magic realism.” I’ve had one experience that led me very briefly to the David Winkler conundrum. A high school friend stayed at my house on a weekend because we’d planned a trip to a national park. He related a dream to me as we drove. He’d been driving his truck (which he had to hot wire because the boarding school didn’t allow student vehicle use without special permission), had rolled the truck at the railway crossing and dented the roof. He’d searched for and found a jack to force back the dent in order to prevent detection.

A week later, my friend and his date were killed in a car/train accident at a that crossing.

I became convinced later that my mind had switched the sequence of events and that I myself had dreamed of my friend's dream after the accident. 

The shape of snowflakes, the life cycles of insects are determined in the structures of their cells. The butterfly cannot come before the caterpillar, the snowflake cannot have five points. I am a skeptic of things magical, like Winkler, particularly because of the observation that, in the human mind, these orders and laws don’t necessarily apply. Memory can reorder events as if we were living in a universe of magic realism. Hysteria, mental disease, even stress can cause the mind to imagine a universe so vividly that we can do nothing but take for granted that it’s reality.

And yet, like Winkler, I’m aware that this view of the universe might also be the result of a mental aberration.

And like Winkler, I want to know what laws govern events, what events are random. Chaos theory provides a good description of the way chance events change everything, all the time. That old idea that if one had stopped to talk to a friend for one minute longer, the accident would (or would not) have happened. Some people place God in that niche as the one who governs chance events; the overwhelming evidence, however, is that the suspension of stable, universal laws governed by the miniscule behaviour of cells, atoms, molecules, neutrinos, etc. are never tampered with by outside forces. If God is a handler of puppets, a controller of events, that control must most certainly be confined to the mind, the consciousness, of people and the actions that take or change courses as a result.

We are individually elements in the lives of every other being. The fact that we exist deflects the course of life for everyone else, sometimes infinitesimally, sometimes hugely, wonderfully—or catastrophically. We watched It’s a Beautiful Life a few days ago. The protagonist played by Jimmy Stewart concludes at one point that his family would be better off if he were dead. It’s this conundrum writ large that faces David Winkler in About Grace; what would we give up to save the life of a loved one? Jesus said, Greater Love hath no Man than this, that he give his Life for a Friend. (John 15:13)

Is it by design or by chance that we find ourselves in families? Have we the courage to take upon ourselves the nurturing of our families when only we can provide it, and at what expense? And how much are we prepared to give to gain back what chance has deprived others of?

For me, About Grace is a parable about family, about courage, about winning and losing and the indomitable perseverance of love. A terrific read.

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i It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.