cover image Snow

Snow

Betsy Howie. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $21 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-15-100273-3

The unnamed 30-ish narrator in this first novel has had some rough going in her dealings with men, including her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Ray, whom she throws on the floor during their rare acts of sex. Somewhere along the way, she has messed up learning ""how to be a girl,"" and this failure torments her with a sense of shame and loss. We know little else about her except that she has a torn thigh muscle from jogging while high on speed some years ago, she smokes and she's depressed. By the third chapter (which is called ""Snow"" and would have been a better beginning of the novel), our protagonist has taken off by car with her two cats, Vinny and Sophie, for a wintry cabin somewhere far north. When Vinny the cat speaks and becomes her ironical alter ego, attempting to help her sort out her feelings of disequilibrium, we surmise that we are somewhere between magical realism and the analyst's couch. Howie, an actress who starred in the recent off-Broadway show Cowgirls, does not develop crucial areas of her narrator's story; but it is clear that she has many fears, which she must exorcise through a three-day journey alone through the snow in order to find more firewood. She meets her terrors in the form of a foul-mouthed bear, Simon, who wounds her weakened thigh, thereby literally releasing her childhood humiliations. Howie manages to integrate the shards of the narrator's fractured personality with the arrival of a long awaited visitor and more cats; however, the silliness one must muddle through to get to that point, including sophomoric prattle from the animal characters and multiple exclamation points at the end of quotations, is more than can be demanded of most readers. Author tour. Rights: Elaine Markson. (Feb.)