Held
The publisher’s blurb calls Held a “breathtaking and ineffable” novel, and it is. There is a dreamlike quality to this multi-decade, multi-generational story of war and love and memory. Beginning with John lying waiting to die on a bleak battlefield in France, we move back and forth between decades and places and characters, all connected in ways both direct and chance-met.
John, still alive but not whole, returns home to his business as a photographer and finds that his subjects’ dead kin sometimes appear in their portraits, manifesting uninvited in the developing pan. Other characters are marked by multiple wars, through their struggles to save lives that are as often as not taken immediately afterward by another bomb.
We get glimpses of these characters’ inner turmoil and their deepest desires, and yet somehow never get to know them. The reader looking for a straightforward historical narrative will not find it, and yet this meditation on the power of memory and love and the places where they intersect is a powerful one that may well stay with you.
