Books |
A Catalog of Birds
Laura Harrington
By
Published: Nov 09, 2017
Category:
Fiction
Laura Harrington may have won the Kleban Award for most promising librettist in American Musical Theatre, but I know her only as a novelist. And I came to know her quite unwillingly. Would I read a novel about a girl in upstate New York whose father grows “the best corn and the best tomatoes in town?” No thanks. Her publicist persisted. A 14-year-old girl? A father in the National Guard whose unit is called up? Oh, and he goes to Iraq. I groaned. But the publicist really seemed to love “Alice Bliss.” And it was short. I let her send it.
There are books that manipulate you into tears, and then there are books that rip you apart, and you keep reading even though it hurts and your tears are raining — I mean that: raining — on the page. That was Alice Bliss for me. I’m not surprised that it won the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction and will soon be staged as a musical.
In her second novel, “A Catalog of Birds,” Harrington has taken on bio-chemical warfare and the poisoning of the innocent. She’s set her book in 1970, at the height of a war that damaged everyone it touched. Nell Flynn is a strong student, headed for college and a career in science. Her brother Billy enlisted as a pilot. His helicopter is shot down in Vietnam, he’s the only survivor. Before the war, he’d been a gifted artist, specializing in birds: As Nell notes, “No one she has ever known has hearing or sight as acute as Billy. She used to tease him about it, called him an extraterrestrial being. He took it entirely for granted. He watched and listened his way inside the birds, merging into the sky with them.”
Now he’s returned from Vietnam to upstate New York, scarred physically and mentally. He can barely hold a pencil. The question that drives the book: Can Billy be healed? Can his life be saved? And what about Megan, Nell’s best friend, who mysteriously disappears, launching a thriller plot? [To order the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the ebook, click here. To read an excerpt, click here.]
This book is not just a story of one veteran of a war that’s long ago and far away. This war came home, to lurk in the shadows of our culture, dormant as a movie monster. I don’t recall massive outrage when we learned of the environmental and health damage caused by our wanton spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam. And there were few protests when Monsanto brought out RoundUp, a domestic herbicide. Could it be carcinogenic? We shrug.
As a writer, Laura Harrington’s instinct is to go directly to the broken places, the critical times, the glaring problems, the fraught relationships, and then to shine a light on them that is fresh and illuminating, and makes you glad you gave yourself over to her book. Because you’re not just reading a “family saga” here — you become a Flynn. Yes, it’s that good.
