“On the Other Side Is March” is a quiet story. The narrator is an older woman with children and grandchildren whose own mother who is in declining health. She is caught in a relatively modern and relatively common bind: caring for the very young and the very old. And that’s about it, in terms of plot. The narrator takes care of her mother, helps with the care of her grandchildren and thinks about what it all means. Not much going on, right?
It feels that way until you hit one of the many crystalline, brilliant moments that fill this book, sentences and images that capture moments and memories and emotions and experiences so perfectly, so beautifully, they take your breath away. For me, that first moment happened when the narrator unspooled the tired cliche “Life is made up of moments” into a celebration of “worn” things. In less than a hundred words, just a few short paragraphs and images, Sólrún Michelsen shows the beauty of that which bears the imprint of time, without overromanticizing it. She returns to that cliche of “moments” and – having given you new eyes to see it through – shows you the truth in an idea buried by overuse and marketing. “A matchless sky only you have the binoculars for.”
There is, of course, a trajectory for the story, even if it’s not one we usually associate with a traditional plot. The tenuous grasp the narrator’s mother has on reality slips. She forgets where she is. She’s asleep during the day and awake at night. She talks to people who aren’t there and doesn’t recognize those who are. Sometimes she is lucid, her sense of humor curling at the edge of some quip. Other times it’s like she’s traveled backward 50 years. And sometimes it can be hard for the narrator to know for sure whether her mother is talking to someone present in the moment or in one of the chronologically fluid spaces we can access through the approach of death.
As the novel flows into its last movement, readers will notice those crystalline images drop away as the narrator spends more time woolgathering. It begins to feel as if she is reaching, even stretching, for those moments of insight that so fill the earlier stages of the book. A tinge of desperation seeps into the prose. Some readers will have a different take on this shift, I’m sure, but to me, it reads as if after days and weeks of watching her mother fade, the nobility of care has been worn out of her. The narrator is tired. She’s frustrated. She wants every minute she can have with her mother but is ready to find her life with her mother gone. She’s tired. Her mother is dying. What other insight do you need?
And then her mother dies.
It may feel like a strange comparison, but the other work that “On the Other Side Is March” most reminds me of, in style and substance, is “In Search of Lost Time.” Though Proust’s sentences have much longer fuses, they both crackle quietly toward explosive moments. And though Proust explores a massive swath of life and experience, they both center the creative, perhaps even reparative, power of remembering. And though they choose different avatars, they both root this creative power in the relationship between mundane objects, places of importance, and language.
Of course, “On the Other Side Is March” has its own goals, its own threads, its own themes, its own range. It focuses on one of the few experiences not included in Proust’s magnum opus and one that is becoming increasingly common in our world. I don’t think “On the Other Side Is March” intends to answer the questions you ask yourself when your mother is fading away. Rather, I think Michelsen is trying to give us some language and images that make it easier to bear the burden of those unanswered questions. Something we can hold onto when adrift. Something we can see in the fog. In this way, “On the Other Side Is March” is a beacon of a novel.
Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, where he has worked since 2004. He is also author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel “An Exaggerated Murder” and “The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the 21st Century.” He has self-published the zine For White Dudes (Like Me) Who Have Not Considered Reading Trans Books. His fiction, criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine, and lives in Somerville. If you’d like to read more about books, subscribe to his newsletter Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Purchase “On the Other Side Is March” from Porter Square Books.
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