Review by Sarah Porterfield
An insomniac spends hours alone at night, begging for sleep but also, for a moment, solitarily facing truths that you just can’t see during the light of day. The world is quiet, the sky is dark, and the insomniac is suddenly separate from the natural order of things, able to watch it all unfold.
That feeling is palpable in the pages of Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, The Age of Miracles. Reading this book is like being immersed in a new order of things. You put the pages down and see the patterns that shape the world as something else entirely—not a given, but a delicate blessing.
“So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark,” Walker writes. “What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light?”
The Age of Miracles centers around an 11-year-old name Julia, who wakes up on an ordinary day in Californian suburbia to discover that the rotation of the earth has begun to slow. Gradually, the days and nights grow longer. Gravity begins to shift. The environment as we know it is thrown into disarray. There are no abrupt, all-encompassing catastrophes, although the world stands at the ready for them. A giant earthquake doesn’t envelop the western hemisphere. The world as we know it does not come to a complete halt.
What happens next is much more subtle.
As the world waits for the cataclysm surely to come, Julia copes with the impending catastrophes of her adolescent life. The fissures in her parents’ marriage, the unraveling of friendships, the anguish of first love, the realizations that people are rarely what they seem.
Julia and her family work to adjust to the new “normal,” and the change in the world relentlessly deepens.
“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees,” Walker writes. “But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
In the past few years, our cultural lexicon has been inundated with tales of disaster: Apocalypse films are a mainstay at the box office; yearly scares about the end-to-come have become commonplace. It’s nothing new to imagine a slowing of the world as we know it, but Walker has done something entirely different. There are no glossy, tidal-wave, edge-of-your-seat tricks up her sleeve. The Age of Miracles is about a young girl, a family, a community and a world that has to redefine their lives. It’s not about the end of the world. It’s about the rediscovery of the joy and delicateness of life.
Julia’s story makes you reevaluate your own. After putting this book down, the light of day and the dark of night never quite look the same.
