Fiction
Angels of Destruction, by Keith Donohue, $24
Keith Donohue’s first book, “The Stolen Child” (2006), was a surprise best seller that recast Irish folklore in a mid-20th century American setting. Now, “Angels of Destruction” similarly finds the miraculous in the everyday by exploring the fissures that grief leaves in the life of Margaret Quinn, whose only child, Erica, left home at 17 and has not been seen since.
The novel opens on a bitterly cold night in 1985, when the now-widowed Margaret hears a knock at the door of her suburban home. She opens it to find a half-frozen girl in a ragged coat. The girl identifies herself as Norah, an orphan; but Margaret immediately imagines a different identity for her.
“On her fingertips, she calculated the years, thinking all the while of the possibilities. Her daughter had been gone for a decade, and the girl appeared to be just shy of nine. Old enough to be her own granddaughter, had such a child ever existed.” Almost immediately, Margaret decides to pass the child off as Erica’s, sent to live with her grandmother.
But the girl’s new classmates soon witnesses strange manifestations of Norah’s distinctly unchildlike talents: She folds origami cranes, then makes them fly; she blows smoke rings that would make Gandalf envious. A playmate glances into her mouth and sees a galaxy of stars. Soon afterward, Norah begins speaking of signs and wonders.
The second part of “Angels of Destruction” flashes back to 1975. It shows the dissolution of the Quinn family as Erica falls into an obsessive relationship with Wiley, and then into Wiley’s own obsession with the Angels of Destruction, a group of West Coast radicals. When Wiley decides to join their revolution, Erica goes with him on a surreal, violent journey.
During a dreamy interlude along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, the runaway lovers take refuge in a woodland cottage occupied by a grief-racked, perhaps mad, old woman and her granddaughter, an otherworldly child. Echoes of Norah’s relationship to Margaret unfold.
Part Three returns to 1985, where the subtle linkings between past and future, grief and acceptance and, most of all, love in its myriad manifestations — parental, sororal, sexual, divine — converge in a remarkable ending.
Donohue never quite reveals the mystery at the heart of Norah’s sudden appearance, and that makes “Angels of Destruction” all the more satisfying and, yes, believable. The book’s coda is beautiful and wrenching, yet still leaves its protagonists and readers open to the possibility that the miraculous, once glimpsed, might recur.
Elizabeth Hand’s 10th novel, “Wonderwall,” about the poet Arthur Rimbaud, will be published this fall.
Nonfiction
Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond, by Meg Daley Olmert, $26
As the Obama family gets ready to welcome a pet into the White House, a new book explores how humans came to let animals into their homes.
Before man was top dog, argues Meg Daley Olmert in her book, “Made for Each Other,” he was lunch. To avoid being eaten, our ancestors probably spent hours watching animals, “intuiting their next move, sensing their emotions and pain.” These encounters “could have sparked in the growing human heart and mind a rudimentary sense of connection.”
A lactating woman comforting a mewling pup might have instinctively let it suckle; more than one anthropologist has reported such behavior among tribes worldwide.
Olmert also suggests that environmental conditions, such as ice ages, sometimes put humans and animals in such close proximity that they could either compete for resources or help each other. Eventually, she writes, the “chemistry flowing between the species was so strong it turned wolf into dog and humans into herders and breeders.”
To underscore modern humans’ need for close contact with animals, Olmert stresses the positive responses to dogs among children with ADD. And she suggests that such advances as milking genetically modified goats for a drug to treat human blood disorders “may bring the human-animal bond to its ultimate conclusion.”
Susan P. Williams is a Washington Post staff writer.
