Off Course: A Novel
Cressida Hartley, struggling with finishing her doctoral dissertation and a general sense of being unmoored, decamps to her family’s California mountain cabin in Huneven’s latest, an understated yet deeply compelling novel. It is the Reagan era, and 28-year-old Cress seeks shelter from the varied trip wires of academia, relationships, and the bone-deep slices to the psyche dealt by family. Shaped by her father’s Depression-baby parsimony and her mother’s warden-like watchfulness over her two daughters during their impressionable teen years, Cress lets loose on the mountain as she discovers lovers, friends, and the long future shadows cast by careless decisions made in an instant. Subconsciously in search of “the nearly unbearable sweetness of being known and adored,” she lets her affections travel from an exuberant man whose failing is to adore every woman who crosses his path to a married father of two whose very existence will permanently alter her sense of self. Seemingly quiet and unexciting at first glance, the story and the resonant cast of characters soon barrel through with their deeply human nuances, all communicated in Huneven’s captivating language. An utterly absorbing read. --Julie Trevelyan