The Great Lenore
by J. M. Tohline
Atticus Books, 2011
ISBN 978-0984510559, 204 pp., $11.98

The cover of J.M. Tohline's debut novel, The Great Lenore, shows the profile of a delicate female head. A small red punt boat seems to drift across the woman's crown, the outline of a tiny red frame pulling it along the sloped blue river of her edges. Foggy waves cross to obscure and add depth to the image, the women and the novel appearing like a delicate river flowing between the reader's hands. To read The Great Lenore is to sit in the small punt boat with Tohline as the red figure, not only as the boat's guide, but as the river's architect, bending the reader in sharp twists, all the while keeping the current calm enough so we can stop to notice the clear, and sometimes, simple human moments along the way.

The novel begins with its narrator, Richard, who has been lent a beach house in Nantucket to work on his next novel. Lenore seeks Richard out, appearing to him four days after her supposed death in a plane crash. Across from where Richard lives is a mansion he names "The Palace," home to the wealthy husband and family of Lenore. Before she embarks on her new life, Lenore has come back to see what all of us secretly wish to know, how people will react once they learn she has died.

The book is pulled by a current of unraveling secrets, held and revealed by characters all transfixed by the "magical" Lenore, her acute effect heightened by the news of her death. The novel is not so much about Lenore, less than dazzling in actual scene. She is blank and beautiful, important because of what she ignites in those around her, the meaning she lets people place on her. The book is then about meaning in general in a world where "time disappears with laudable indifference to the existence of us all" (204) Who and what is special, and are these things still beautiful if time keeps washing them away?

Tohline continually points out the passing seconds and minutes to the reader, the inevitable insignificance of these characters experiences and feelings. However, at several points, time stands still. These are moments where the characters confess, collide, and love. In a confession to Richard, we see Lenore intimately for the first time, Lenore runs from the plane that would lead her to her death to retrieve a gift intended for her beloved—these moments stand still framed in how they take up space, and make us pause.

Tohline's language is playful, clean, and sparse. He gives what is, and not much more:

Lenore told me to move closer to her that night, and I scooted up the bed. She put her legs over mine. She held my eyes. She told me stories. She listened when I spoke. She fell asleep in the early hours of the morning, and I pulled the sheets out from under her and covered her and stood in the doorway before I left (111).

The tone is relaxed, and Tohline's restraint allows the reader to fill in meaning for themselves, becoming coconspirators in the shaping of the novel. At points this can become frustrating, since Lenore is more often described as "ravishing" and "gorgeous" than shown as such. It is surprising that an author with such a talent at creating scene fails to show to the reader this world and in lieu accepts the less-satisfying telling. This could, however, add to the theme of the novel, that meaning is self-created and subjective. That The Great Lenore was invented by those who chased her, "perhaps she was only an idea" (111).

This simplicity also allows the quiet moments of revelation to shine:

Lenore studied the people who passed them. She looked at their smiles and their scowls, at their loveliness and their ugliness. She thought how odd it was that all of these people had one thing in common: They each were alive, absolutely alive. They each breathed and moved and had thoughts and feelings and souls. Every person who passed them, no matter how different, was exactly the same. Alive! (79).

It is clear Tohline is a man who loves literature and all the possibilities of it. However, he sometimes seems carried away by his own writerly voice. Passages detailing Richard's writing and aspirations feel like a slip into Tohline's own voice, creating a dam in the quiet and powerful river the reader has relaxed into.

Those weeks in Nantucket impacted my life in such a profound manner as to render word-based definitions difficult if not entirely impossible. But words are my life—so I try hard, and I do the best I can. Words. Sometimes so empty. And yet, so often, our only bridge to concreteness and meaning against the slosh that comprises our lives (116).

Although there is a feeling of truth to Tohline's statements, the reader may wish he would keep more of his cards to himself. It is hard not to interpret Richard's reflections on the difficulty of translating experience to words as the author's own lamenting. Tohline's prose, otherwise confident and clean, can stand without these second-party reflections on his craft.

While this literary indulgence might sink other books, Tohline manages to recover, through his calm prose and magical characters. The Great Lenore is an enjoyable ride in which Tohline playfully and carefully lays out a world as real and exciting as ducking your head under water. In its neatness, it can seem that Tohline is holding back the true fury and inelegance of life, and therefore, the true revelations. However, in truth Tohline has successfully cleaned the excess away, serving us with a small slice life so that we too can stop the clock and see some meaning, some order in the messes we have made.—Sierra Troy-Regier