The Year of Fog

The Year of Fog is Michelle Richmond’s third novel, but the first one that I have read. The story is about Abby, a photographer who is engaged to a man who has a six year old child, Emma. They live in San Francisco. Abby took Emma to the beach one day while she was shooting photographs. It was a foggy day at the beach and while Abby was photographing a dead baby seal on the beach, Emma ran up ahead and then disappeared.

While this is a mystery novel that involves Abby never giving up searching for Emma, it is also a very interesting study of memory. I found this to be a quite captivating take on the story. Emma studies all that she can find about memory, convinced that there is something that she saw that she needs to remember in order to find Emma.

This is a good novel, with several themes going on, including the nightmarish tragedy of a child missing, the study of memory and the impact on relationships that such tragedies impose. I also thoroughly enjoyed all of the San Francisco background and history in the book…so far my most favorite city that I have visited.

What I also found interesting is that the novel is based upon a happenstance incident that occurred to the author. She wrote about it in the San Franciscan Gate. I include the article below.

One more side-note: I was reading a magazine review of a book the other day that sounded very good and I decided to write down the name of it in order to remember that I want to read it…it is by the same author! (The book is called No One You Know.)
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/04/29/CMGRJN7UTO1.DTL_
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Sunday, April 29, 2007 (SF Chronicle)
The Stories We Tell
Michelle Richmond
Emma Balfour walked into my life in the summer of 2003. Our paths collided
on Ocean Beach, the 3-mile stretch of gray sand and graffiti-spattered
seawall marking the western edge of the city.
It was a cold day and the beach was buried in dense fog, the kind of fog
that makes you feel as if you are lost in some strange dream. It was in
this bleak landscape that the child appeared, wearing a red sweatshirt,
blue jeans rolled up to her calves, no shoes. She was carrying a small
yellow bucket. Although she was only 6 or 7 years old, she appeared to be
alone. She had long black hair, blue eyes, dimples.
She bent down, picked something out of the sand and laid it gently in the
bucket.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi." Her voice was sweet and raspy, completely unguarded.
"What are you collecting?"
"Sand dollars," she said seriously, holding out the bucket for me to
examine. At the bottom lay a single, perfect sand dollar.
I reached down and touched it admiringly. "Lovely."
"I know!" she said, returning to her search.
I continued walking slowly, turning around every few steps to glance at
her. I kept waiting for an adult to appear. None did.
Then something caught my eye -- a shape in the sand, a dark crescent
several feet away. I went to examine it. It was a dead seal pup, partially
covered by sand.
A minute or two later, I turned back toward where the girl had been, but
she wasn't there. She had disappeared into the fog. If I had not talked
with her and heard her raspy voice, if I had not felt the rough sand
dollar with my own fingers, I might have believed I had dreamt her up.
I never saw her again. But something had happened; this stranger had
walked into my imagination, and she would not go away. For the next few
weeks, I thought of her several times a day. Finally, having nowhere else
to go, she stepped into a novel. I had not planned to write this novel. In
fact, having recently completed my first, I was rather determined not to
write another one. But there she was, the mysterious girl on the beach,
demanding my attention.
Three years and almost 400 pages later, I had figured her out. I knew what
she was doing at Ocean Beach, why she vanished and what happened to her
afterward. I had given her a name, Emma Balfour, and I had uncovered her
secret history. In the process, I had uncovered secrets about San
Francisco as well -- the mass grave beneath the swank Lincoln Park Golf
Course, for example, and the broken tombstones that make up parts of the
gutter at Buena Vista Park. I had come to understand my neighborhood, the
Outer Richmond, and its previous life as the Outside Lands, once home to
sand dunes and bordellos. I discovered that the windmill at the
northwestern edge of Golden Gate Park, where I often take my toddler son
to play, once pumped the water that turned the desolate sand dunes into
lush greenery.
By the end of my fictional journey, I had also learned a thing or two
about myself, for the places we love are a key to our own inner workings.
My husband grew up in the Bay Area, left for seven years and returned. I
am one of the many who grew up somewhere else, arrived and immediately
recognized San Francisco as home. But I never really knew my adopted city
until I began seeing it through the eyes of my characters. Its hills and
hideaways, its woods and water, lend to it a magic and mystery that is
missing from the flat Gulf Coast landscape of my childhood. And while the
balmy waters and gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico beckon swimmers, the
wild Pacific in these northwesterly climes does just the opposite. It is a
place for rugged surfers armed with wetsuits and surfboards, not
swimsuit-clad children with floatees. The beach itself is strewn with
glass and garbage and the ashes of illegal bonfires. Not long ago, a
homeless man was found dead on Ocean Beach, suffocated by the shifting
sand. When I take my son there to play, I always have an eye out for
potential dangers.
Which is perhaps why the girl stayed with me: She was a version of myself
from nearly three decades before, but in a drastically altered context. On
one hand, I felt a bit jealous. How different my life would have been had
my parents chosen to stay in the Bay Area, where my father's naval ship
was stationed during Vietnam, instead of returning home to Alabama. On the
other hand, she called to mind buried fears about raising a child in the
city.
It is possible that Emma -- not the actual girl on the beach but the one
she became, in my novel and in my imagination -- was a product of my own
deepest fears, as so many of our stories are. A child vanishes into the
fog -- truly, a parent's worst nightmare. Like a Wes Craven flick or an
amusement park house of horrors, the stories we read, and the stories we
tell, serve as a repository for the unthinkable. By way of story, we
relegate the terrible to the realm of the imagination. And then we rely on
the flimsiest of things -- vigilance and good luck -- to keep it there.
Michelle Richmond's novel set in contemporary San Francisco, "The Year of
Fog," is just out from Delacorte and has been optioned by Newmarket Films. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2007 SF Chronicle

The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

This is an amazing book and one that I will definitely return to in order to read it again. It was written in It is the story of a father and son walking through a burned out America. They push or drag a cart with the little that they own, including any scavenged food that they can find, as they try to walk to the coast. They have a pistol to defend themselves when they come across “the bad guys” who try to steal whatever goods they might find on others. The story never tells what has happened to destroy the country, for that is not what the story is about at all. It is about love and survival. It is amazing. I highly recommend this book!

This book was published in 2006 and won the 2007 Pulitizer Prize for Fiction.

Taken from the back of the book:

“The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, ‘each the other’s world entire’ are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.”

If you have read my other posts, you will know that I did a review on No Country for Old Men, also by Cormac McCarthy. His themes in these two books are very basic and touching. I found this short biography on him at the Barnes and Noble website:

Biography
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper.
The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark.
In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press.
In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985.
After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998. McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was also published by Knopf in 2006.