Hurry Along

Poet and painter Plimpton's fiction debut is a luscious non-narrative map of shifting emotional and physical landscapes born out of the quotidian lives of people, trees, animals, beaches, and more. Plimpton usually makes her way through the book via the eyes of individuals somehow intertwined, but just as suddenly as a world is crafted through Plimpton's effortless prose, it shifts or disappears entirely. The novel's vibrant, contoured world grants its every facet a degree of agency%E2%80%94from the effects of domesticity to the weather itself%E2%80%94rendering characters' inner states via impression as opposed to exposition. What might become tedious in the hands of a less skilled writer is achieved by Plimpton with aplomb%E2%80%94because the book's constituent elements are at once familiar and capable of unending transformation, the sensation of reading Plimpton's prose is that of wandering vividly decorated corridors of imagination. Most rewarding is Plimpton's refusal to inhibit her evolving creations; she allows them to develop perpetually, and then drop delicately away, like a flower's petals, "fluttered" by the breeze that we feel, but cannot see. (Feb.)