Nine years before the bulk of the story takes place, New York University student Myra; her future husband, Alfred; and their friends witness the accidental death of Myra\u2019s then-boyfriend Liam after he falls off a fire escape. In the present, Myra and Alfred have a stagnant marriage; things are especially uneasy of late due to Alfred\u2019s cancer diagnosis and Myra\u2019s announcement of her intention to go to Canada to find her father\u2019s grave. Myra feels that the trip is a necessary part of her research to understand a phenomenon she calls \u201cthe cry\u2014a sad, strange form of silence\u2026.She did not know what the cry was, but she felt it had to do with her father.\u201d Her father\u2019s death is something of a mystery\u2014seemingly the result of an accident at his oil company job\u2014and her family disapproves of her quest. But as Myra journeys deeper into the wilderness, some very unusual things occur\u2014including Myra waking up in a motel room in a new body. Pahl\u2019s sometimes-surreal story features some majestic phrases, including its very first sentence: \u201cThe streets were flooded with twentysomethings\u2014with shining, distracted bodies and faces like bells ringing at noon.\u201d As the journey comes to an end, without closure, the protagonist gazes at the \u201csilence and the blankness\u201d of a cemetery headstone, hoping that \u201con the void would appear the sweetness of a crude sign.\u201d Early chapters enjoyably drop in philosophical queries while pursuing a straightforward plot. The final pages, however, lose this sense of structure and become overwhelmed by incoherent ponderings: \u201cThe deft cohesion that earlier flood the world, allaying chaos, assuaging heaviness with rapture, is washed away, like a patch on the surface of a flowing river that in one moment seems netted together through mystical affinity then in the next disperse in the uncoordinated mass of the waters.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nine years before the bulk of the story takes place, New York University student Myra; her future husband, Alfred; and their friends witness the accidental death of Myra\u2019s then-boyfriend Liam after he falls off a fire escape. In the present, Myra and Alfred have a stagnant marriage; things are especially uneasy of late due to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}