All the Winters After
By Seré Prince Halverson; Sourcebooks Landmark; 2016; $24.99 hardcover; 384 pages
A reader opening this novel finds that one of the two principal characters is named Kachemak and a map depicts the land forms and communities — some renamed and others not — of an easily identified southern Kenai Peninsula. A town remarkably like Homer, but named Caboose, has a spit of its own. "The Homestead," where most of the action takes place, is right where one would find the Kilcher family homestead. And two Russian-named villages lie just beyond it.
Welcome to the fictional world of "All the Winters After," the new book by Seré Prince Halverson, an accomplished writer from Northern California who was so inspired by her visits to Homer that she imagined it the location of a love story between two damaged and isolated people who, in finding each other, find themselves.
As the story begins, Kachemak Winkle returns home after a 20-year absence. He'd left Alaska at the age of 18 when his parents and brother died in a plane crash. An aunt and grandmother still live in Caboose, but his family's remote homestead has been left to itself. When he makes his way down the long, overgrown road, he finds not ruins but a young woman, a squatter, who has maintained the place almost like a museum — with everything in its place to remind him of his family and the guilt he's carried so long.
The woman, Nadia, has spent a decade hiding at the homestead. She's from the more conservative of two Russian Old Believer villages near the head of the bay and has been caring for herself and her dog while she learns about the world from diaries and books she discovered in the house.
Complex, likeable characters
Secrets and mysteries abound, but "All the Winters After" is a literary rather than a mystery novel. The point is not to solve the puzzles here — indeed, they're not particularly well camouflaged — but to immerse oneself in the characters and their connections to their histories and place. Kache (as he's called), Nadia and the supporting cast are complex, believable, likeable characters who can seem like close friends by the end of the book. The stories of their lives and of the land where they live and thrive make for a joyride of a read.
Nadia, in particular, is a delightful character — a strong and capable woman with a great sense of humor. In her isolation, she developed an odd relationship to the rest of the world and, in finally speaking to other people, is more likely to quote old magazine advertisements or Melville than to recognize anything of popular culture. Other women characters shine, and the multiple love stories involved are atypical, with outcomes that might surprise.
The writing throughout, packed with sensory details, flows beautifully through the characters' relationships and the landscape. At the homestead in spring: "One day, the trees' branches shivered bare, and the next, they were blanketed with buds." At the Spit Tune, a bar on the spit: "Signed dollar bills from every corner of the world hung from the ceiling and walls."
There's much sensitivity these days to "cultural appropriation," which in terms of writing means depicting people and ways of life outside of one's own experience. Halverson took a big risk in creating a character who had run away from a village of Russian Old Believers, and in writing about Old Believer traditions in general. The actual Old Believers, who first settled around Homer in the 1960s and have since spread out to a number of communities elsewhere in the state, tend to maintain their traditions away from the public eye. Much to her credit, Halverson did significant research to portray the culture with reasonable accuracy. She also was careful not to attribute violence in the story to villagers, or to perpetuate too much in the way of cultural stereotypes.
Enchanted by Homer
Halverson is author of "The Underside of Joy," an international best-seller published in 18 languages. In her end pages here, she says that when she first visited Homer, she "fell under its spell" and envisioned this novel. But after writing 50 pages, she set it aside for 20 years before taking it up again. She has various ties to Alaska, with family members coming from or living here and a certain passion for the place. While working on the book, she stayed in a cabin on the Kilcher homestead. About Homer, she wrote, "I borrowed heavily from the town, especially its location, but I also had fun making things up and altering them."
It's not often that writers from outside Alaska make the effort to understand and convey the hold our state has on those who live here. Halverson has delivered a recognizable version of ourselves within her larger, very satisfying story about strength of character and the power of love.
Nancy Lord is a Homer-based writer and former Alaska writer laureate. Her books include "Fishcamp," "Beluga Days" and "Early Warming."