Anita Shreve & Mark Spragg: Light on Snow & An Unfinished Life

Light on Snow by Anita Shreve.

What these two have in common is that at the heart — and the word is used here to signal a sort of warning — of each novel is a kid. An older-than-her-years kid, a cute kid who is living through hard times, a kid who will stand as metaphor for two through-troubles-we-shall-prevail pieces of fiction. Because innocence can melt the hardest of hearts. And does. And melting hard hearts can result in the end of innocence and beginning of a schmaltzy kind of understanding of the complications of human nature.

Light on Snow begins before the New Hampshire snows have melted. Through the snow a father and daughter go for a lonely walk. They don't talk much. The father is still grieving, silently, inwardly, for the loss of his wife and baby daughter in a car crash two years before. He has fled the city, and his profession, for the life of a furniture-making recluse, and half-hearted father to his remaining child, 12-year-old Nicky.

On this walk, father and daughter come across an abandoned newborn girl; they take her to hospital, although Nicky would like to keep her. The baby is blue from the cold but otherwise perfect. Just as baby Clara, the dead baby was after the crash: "... strangely intact apart from the purple oval bruise to one side of her forehead. The magnitude of the waste was unbearable, Clara's perfect body a unique torment only a jealous god could have devised."

The god being, presumably, jealous of the family's previously near-perfect life which is, again presumably, why Nicky's father can no longer bear to go on pretending to live inside the remnants of the life left to him.

So he opts for loneliness despite Nicky's growing need for women around her.

Into this lonely life comes a young woman; the abandoned baby's mother, Charlotte. This cast of three assembled, all strangers to each other really, the snow begins to fall heavily and they are shut up together to watch — as we do — this little drama play out.

An Unfinished Life is a grittier — at least in its setting — sort of drama. There is a mother, Jean, and daughter, Griff, on the road together fleeing the mother's latest abusive boyfriend. He is on the road chasing them as they seek shelter in the only place Jean knows to go: a tiny Western town in Wyoming where she grew up and where she was the driver in a car crash which killed Griff's father.

They head for Griff's grandfather's farm where Jean's father-in-law, Einar, looks after his friend, a black cowboy called Mitch who has been terribly mauled by a bear. These two men survived Korea together; now Einar can't forgive himself for not being able to save Mitch from the mauling.

He also cannot forgive Jean for killing his son. He does not know that she was pregnant at the time and that he has a 10-year-old granddaughter.

Right, so you know where both of these stories are going to go. It is probably not possible to embark on the telling of either of these two yarns without ending up in the inevitable place. It is certainly not possible to write a sentence like this one from Spragg's Griff without the certain expectation of the happy, heart-melting ending: "... and she stands in the dark and breathes the wet air. It makes her shiver, but she feels a little like this place belongs to her. It's like she's already lived here, or it's a place she needed to find. Like home."

Inevitable, too, that you find yourself waiting for a sentence like this one in Shreve's book, from Nicky, on her father: "My father is still, as if watching a critical scene in a film, a scene that makes you hold your breath. I know that he is thinking about Clara, and that there is, inside of him, an immense pain. But there is, too, a kind of healing, the equivalent of a sigh released."

The problem with this is that it is like being told you are watching a critical scene, and if you have to be told, the writing isn't working. Shreve's writing is an odd thing to behold. I've never been able to figure out why it is somehow deemed literary, in the hierarchy of the bestseller scheme of things, when Joanna Trollope's, for example, is not. I've always thought Trollope's books robustly written and honest. Shreve's make me slightly uneasy. They are a bit like those watercolour landscapes on the covers: pretty, in a vaguely arty sort of way; they are empty sorts of pictures.

Spragg's story, too, is like watching scene after hard-wrought scene: it feels like reading writing. That it is to be a film starring Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez is no surprise at all.

That there are no surprises, and no surprise at the obviousness of all of this, makes the reading of these two novels a dispiriting, desultory reading experience. Doubly so when you read them back to back. And oddly so when they are supposed to be heart-warming fiction — which is likely the problem.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer

* 'Light on Snow' - Little Brown, $37
* 'An Unfinished Life' - Jonathan Cape, $34.95