Erika Ritter

In Elizabeth Hay’s 2007 novel Late Nights on Air, the book a character selects to cure her insomnia falls open at a passage beginning “Like imperfect sleep.” It is a “lovely coincidence,” the character muses, “but it doesn’t lead anywhere.” As Hay’s work demonstrates better than almost anyone else’s, coincidences, recurrences, re-encounters and reverberations from the past can lead novelists to fruitful places in their explorations of human…

Among other worthy preoccupations, Joan Thomas’s first novel, Reading by Lightning, explores the potent fantasy of being snatched from familiar surroundings and deposited in a completely alien realm, far from home. That is, I think, a common childhood conception, and one that strikes most of us even now as alternately terrifying and tantalizing. For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s (including…

“Can we agree, the past is not dead but the present is its surprising and complex flower?” posits Felix d’Amboisee in the quotation that opens Bill Gaston’s latest novel. Proving d’Amboisee’s dual proposition is the tall order that novelist Gaston seeks to fill in The Order of Good Cheer, by alternating narratives of two Canadian coastal…