A bear climbs onto a cabin’s deck, presses his nose to the sliding door. Inside, a young woman stands to face him. She comes closer, and closer yet, until only the glass stands between them . . . The year is 1981, Reagan is in the White House, and the country is stalled in a recession. Cressida Hartley, a gifted Ph.D. student in economics, moves into her parents’ shabby A-frame cabin in the … cabin in the Sierras to write her dissertation. In her most intimate and emotionally compelling novel to date, Michelle Huneven–author of Blame, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award–returns with her signature mix of fine-grained storytelling, unforgettable characters, and moral complexity.
Cress, increasingly resistant to her topic (art in the marketplace), allows herself to be drawn into the social life of the small mountain community. The exuberant local lodge owner, Jakey Yates, with his big personality and great animal magnetism, is the first to blur Cress’ focus. The builder Rick Garsh gives her a job driving up and down the mountain for supplies. And then there are the two Morrow brothers, skilled carpenters, who are witty, intriguing, and married.
As Cress tells her best friend back home in Pasadena, being a single woman on the mountain amounts to a form of public service. Falling prey to her own perilous reasoning, she soon finds herself in dark new territory, subject to forces beyond her control from both within and without.
Unsentimental, immersive, and beautifully written–“Huneven’s prose is flawless,” according to The New Yorker–Off Course evokes the rapture of new love, the addictive draw of an intense, impossible connection, and what happens when two people simply can’t let go of each other or of their previous commitments. As her characters struggle with and delight in one another, Huneven subtly exposes the personal and social forces at play: issues of class, money, and family, as well as the intricate emotional and economic transactions between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between lovers, and between friends.
Michelle Huneven is one of our most searching, elegant novelists–Richard Russo has called her “a writer of extraordinary and thrilling talent.” In Off Course, she introduces us to an intelligent young woman who discovers that love is the great distraction, and impossible love the greatest distraction of all.
more
Let me begin by saying the last third of this book is much more engaging than the first two-thirds.
Cressida Hartley heads to her parent’s remote vacation cabin to write her dissertation. Looking for any excuse to delay, she gets involved with the locals, including, ultimately, an affair with a married man.
Along the way and through other characters, the author explores the nature of love and passion as it plays out in a small community, full of people with differing values. It also forces you to look at how and when does love become obsession and how much will one person endure to keep it going?
That sounds interesting but I didn’t find myself caring that much for the main characters, nor believing the strength of their emotions. Then, by the time I did get engaged (the last third of the book), there was an ending that simply tied everything up too neatly in too few pages. So, to me, the book isn’t nearly as believable or interesting as it might have been.
I chose this book because I read an article that suggested that OFF COURSE would be a good contemporary choice for MADAME BOVARY fans. Maybe not surprisingly, MB is MUCH richer.
Michelle Huneven is unquestionably a thoughtful, rich, and evocative writer. Her sense of place, atmosphere, sight, sense and sound is impeccable. When she describes a scene where the protagonist wanders a mountaintop as the snow’s coming in, the reader can almost feel the change in temperature and the brisk slap of building wind. Her characters are eccentric, wonderfully flawed and oh-so-human; fully realized, entertaining, and likable or unlikable as need be.
The story and its many fine details exhibit her attentiveness to the minutia — familiar or otherwise — that make characters, settings and plots so real and engaging. Cressida Hartley is both exasperating and completely relatable in her struggles to find her footing outside her family dynamic, as well as define who and what she wants to be when she grows up. The many entertaining distractions of her mountain retreat help drive her deeper into that discovery process, while simultaneously pulling her away from what it is she set out to do, much to the frustration of controlling parents and disapproving friends and family who don’t quite get this chapter of her life.
Though swiftly paced and richly engrossing, there was some disappointment in both the trajectory of the narrative and the way which it all wrapped up. In some ways the book could be subtitled, “The Anatomy of an Affair,” as the plot pulls us through months — years — of Cressida’s unlikely relationship with a local man deeply embedded in his community and his unhappy but seemingly immutable marriage.
There are all the standard “affair” plot points: passionate but healing sexual encounters; dates not kept, lonely holidays, distraught wives, disapproval from community busy-bodies, recurring disappointments, cyclical break-ups and rapprochements, and the never-ending, misguided, and wearily familiar expectation of a happy ending with her clearly elusive lover. From mid-story to nearly the end, we take that ride with Cressida, observing as she sacrifices goals, principles, jobs, friends, even her good sense, just to FEEL that heady, elemental attachment to a man who is — at least to this reader — a quizzically clumsy match. This part of the plot felt dated and by-the-book, to the point that I almost felt I was reading something that was actually written in the 1980s… there was nothing particularly fresh or revelatory on the subject of “having affairs with married men,” which, for me, was a little disappointing, given the talent and depth of this writer.
And it would have all been acceptable had the story taken us to someplace empowering and transformational for Cressida. As it was, the denouement of the book felt a bit like a toss-off; every decision made post-affair — from her marriage to her job to her life in general — was presented as inconsequential in its narrative presentation, as if all the meaning and merit of her life after the mountain paled in comparison to the heat and flare of that one passionate affair. If that’s what the author intended to convey, she succeeded. But I closed the book feeling a bit let-down, as if a really good story had been blunted by a flat, uninspired conclusion.
Still… I enjoyed the read for what it was. If nothing else, it’s a beautifully written if overly familiar cautionary tale on the folly of infidelity.