Book Review

An unnamed town with an unnamed narrator are at the center of The Avian Hourglass’s spiraling universe of prose. Starting with chapter 180 and counting down as the narrative progresses, Lindsey Drager’s fourth novel is a surrealist exploration of what it means to move forward in time while exploring the history of ourselves and our world. Drager crafts a novel that is at once folktale and postmodern literature through the eyes of a twenty-something-year-old narrator living in a town that might literally be the entire universe.

Our narrator’s life is populated by a—and there is really no other word for them—quirky cast of side characters whose personalities are each dictated by a unique set of traits and interests. Uri, the retired insurance man, is a playwright whose wisdom sprouts from his obsession with theater. Luce is the narrator’s aunt who hugs in one of three ways, can’t work with circles, and memorizes the etymology of words because she “‘finds it useful to track things back . . . finds it’s useful to remember their roots.” Sulien, an older man whose partner died because of complications with mental health, knows seemingly everything about birds in a world where the birds have disappeared.

The core narrative of The Avian Hourglass follows our narrator’s day-to-day life as she struggles to become a radio astronomer, raise triplets, and find her purpose in a world increasingly distant from the realities of her childhood. The birds have disappeared, the stars no longer shine through the clouds of pollution, and the town’s population has been split in an ideological divide between YES and NO for decades. With moments of profound existentialism and downright weirdness, our narrator navigates the distance between her dreams and her reality. While Drager explores the powerful nature of everyday life, the characters become two-dimensional caricatures of themselves, in some ways slotting into their roles as sage advisors in a folktale and in others commenting on the metafictional aspects of postmodern literature.

In Drager’s world, every moment is blanketed in meaning, shrouding the brilliance of the mundane in layers of overwhelming metaphor. When peeled back, the center is the folktale of “Girl in Glass Vessel,” which is about a young girl stuck forever in a vessel looking at the outside world and wishing she was there. There are many versions of this tale, but as our narrator says, “What there always is—what persists in each telling—is this: a woman constrained by a contraption that’s trying to protect her, fake stars, dead birds, and the looping nature of the tale, the story that tells itself, the answer to the question a question itself, like that old riddle about which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

Cause and effect are important considerations in The Avian Hourglass, and lead the reader back and back and back to the root of each question asked: What was at the beginning? Why does that matter if we can only move forward? There is a desperate reaching and displacement in the narrative: “I realize the trace of the light in the sky means something else, also: that when we look up, we can never see now.” Our narrator craves the stars so constantly that she spends most of her life in the past. To the reader, there is a sense that life is just an illusory version of what it could be. We reach for the Platonic ideal, but it is always just beyond the graze of our fingertips.

This displacement and reach are threaded into the novel like the common tailor bird intricately threads its nest together (if there is one thing to say about this book, it is that there are a plethora of fun bird facts). Drager’s prose achieves this mostly through repetition. Repetition of the words “girl, bird, curse, bad,” whose etymologies are unknown, repetition of The Ghost of Birds’ (who tell the story of “Girl in Glass Vessel”) indecipherable noises, repetition of the moment of the crisis in Uri’s play (“No, yes. Yes, no. Yes, yes. No. No.”). The beats of the narrative never let up, constantly pounding toward the end, counting down to one.

It is in this counting and repetition that the narrative can become exhausting for an undiligent reader. The Avian Hourglass is a slow story about folding into oneself that relies heavily on introspection and profundity rather than consistent plot points to propel the narrative forward. Yet, for all our narrator’s introspection, there is a shroud keeping her from understanding. When talking to Luce, our narrator thinks:

[Luce] had that look, the look that I should be understanding something about the world that I didn’t yet understand. I got the feeling it had to do with something I should be seeing but wasn’t, something I wasn’t sensing about how I went about being in the world. Like the microwave background in all those years before it was discovered—the key to everything that lingered undetected, just beyond our reach.

It is in these moments that Drager’s sense of metanarrative and postmodern literature shine. Without the narrative’s direct understanding of our narrator’s inability to understand, The Avian Hourglass falls apart. It is in the searching, in the seeking, in the reaching for a life that our narrator fulfills her arc. One begins to realize, as they read, that it is an arc so often similar to our own lives.

In discussing human nature and desire, Drager comments on the nature of storytelling as well. As Uri tells our narrator, “‘no one—not the narrator or the characters, not the actors or the audience—ever gets access to the real story. You can play the tape back a million times, you can reread the story for eternity, and each time, something will go unheard.’”

Drager does not craft an easily digestible life lesson for the reader—not a critique, but perhaps a warning to those who pick up The Avian Hourglass. The reader is left to pick apart the pieces, to craft their own meaning from the parts scattered throughout, and to know, even then, something will always be unknown. Yet, as our narrator tells us, “while I know art won’t fix anything, it has been my experience that it soothes the hurt.”