The Snow Child

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (2012), 386pp. Nominee, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2013.

On Christmas Day of last year, I came home to find an unexpected package on my front porch. An unexpected book-shaped package. It was from a good friend I met in graduate school in North Carolina, with whom I sat many stifling summer afternoons on the unscreened patio of a bar and, as flies sipped leisurely from the condensate of our beers, pondered books and how we came so many miles to that spit of a town east of Raleigh.

On several occasions, my friend mentioned that a woman from his hometown of Palmer, Alaska had written a book I should read. As much as I trust this person’s taste in books, everyone who has ever heard, “my friend’s got a script,” “my friend’s got a band,” “my friend wrote a book,” etc, knows that these kinds of recommendations can raise red flags in all but the exceptionally un-cynical. So, it was with curiosity and at least the tiniest bit of skepticism that I opened the package to find Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child.

The Snow Child is about a middle-aged couple whose most fervent desire—to have a child—has eluded them, and so they move from Pennsylvania to Alaska to become homesteaders and escape the constant reminder of their disappointed dream. On the first snow of the year early in their stay, Jack and Mabel leave their cabin late at night to build a small snowperson, whom they outfit with a scarf, mittens, and berry-red lips. Soon afterwards, a young girl emerges from the woods, and Mabel remembers an old Russian fairytale in which a couple much like Jack and herself create from snow the child they have so longed for. From there the book walks a delicate tightrope between realism and fantasy in a way that proves both beautiful and wholly engaging.

Though it is set in the 1920s, The Snow Child gives almost no indication of this, at least not in terms of the cultural touchstones normally associated with the post-WWI era. Mention of flapper attire and Ford’s Model A truck sneak into the last chapters of the book, but The Snow Child is not as interested in history on a large scale as it is in the personal histories of its few but finely crafted characters. Ivey seems to have an incredible clarity of purpose in the way she depicts her characters—each is complexly motivated but totally honest. If there was a single line in this book that rang untrue, I can’t recall it.

For me, Ivey’s novel is evocative of Willa Cather, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck. It’s a story about a people and a place, and the relationship between the two. Like Frost, my attitude toward nature is often ambivalent. I am not really the type of person who accepts the “circle of life” with much satisfaction, and so it can be easy for me to look at the way one life preys upon another as evidence that nature is indifferent, if not cruel. The Snow Child, however, finds balance in all things: fantasy and reality, artistry and pragmatism, concealment and revelation, presence and absence, life and death, nature and culture, self and others, desire and the fulfillment of desire. The story is told in a way that neither romanticizes nor convicts but seeks to understand and appreciate the world as it is.

In short, The Snow Child a marvelous book that I highly recommend and a prodigious debut from an author I hope to read more from. It seems like it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to enjoy a novel without having to think about the burdens of political relationships of one variety or another. And while I do also frequently enjoy this kind of thinking, politics shines a light on what divides us, when there are so many other elements of human experience that unite.