Blurred Vision

Anne Michaels’s third novel, Held, opens on a scene of carnage. A man named John lies in the mud of the Western Front in 1917, wounded during the battle of Cambrai. As John gazes at the ruins of the French city around him, he contemplates the mysteries of life and death in brief, poetic bursts. He remembers meeting his wife, Helena, and thinks about his mother. His mind turns to the women back home on the Yorkshire coast who knit sweaters with intentional flaws, each “deliberate error in a sleeve, a waistband, a cuff, a shoulder” serving as a signature to identify drowned fishermen. John worries that he will die here, dirty and anonymous, unwashed by the salty waves of the North Sea and without even a gansey to set him apart. A young man watches him with unblinking eyes. “How alert the dead soldier looked,” John thinks, “how absolutely, utterly awake.”

Miraculously, John survives and goes back to Yorkshire. He sets up shop as a photographer, specializing in...