There are poets who write the occasional novel, with varying degrees of success—Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock is one of the good ones—and novelists who publish a volume of poems now and then, also a mixed bag (figures as various as John Updike and Jim Harrison come to mind). But there aren't many writers who publish many volumes of poetry AND a lot of novels, fully at ease in both forms. One who does is the Native American writer Diane Glancy; another is Marly Youmans. Add to that list Laura Kasischke (pronounced Ka-ZISS-kee; hers is a name you should get acquainted with, if you don't know it already).
Kasischke's latest novel is the kind of book that should be read in one sitting the first time around. If you spread your first encounter with it across several sessions in the course of two or three days, you'll lose some of the special pleasure that comes from hunkering down with a story that's plotted with artful cunning, a short novel that reads more like a novella, with momentum that keeps building.
I'm not going to say a lot in detail about the story and its protagonist, Holly Judge, who wakes up on Christmas morning with a sense of foreboding. Holly's husband, Eric, is already gone, en route to pick up his aging parents, who—such is the plan, at any rate—will be joining Holly and Eric and their adopted daughter, Tatiana, for Christmas Day festivities, along with some friends.
If you were tagging this novel, you'd want to include motherhood, adoption [from Russia], MFA programs, and poetry, among other subjects, but that doesn't give you a sense of what's distinctive about Mind of Winter. In some ways, Kasischke has written a book that's reminiscent of a certain strain of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, stories and novels built like a trap, in which seemingly incongruous elements were fused: horror and a strong vein of social satire, with neither canceling the other out.
Mind of Winter, in contrast, is very much grounded in the quotidian, but in other respects it follows that template, though Kasischke's prose is much better than most of what you'd have found in Galaxy or Astounding . Holly is the central consciousness of the book, with all the action filtered through her, and the way Kasischke draws us into her world is masterful. She isn't a likable character—often, in fact, she's downright maddening—but for the duration of this tale she's as present, as unmistakably real, as the glass of water sitting on your bedside table.
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
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