‘Held’ by Anne Michaels     (2023) – 220 pages

There are some breathtaking lines in the 2024 Booker long-listed novel ‘Held’ which create lovely images like the following:

“Mara and Alan walked home through the winter streets. Past midnight, hardly any lights in the windows, the night sky deepened by the clarity of the cold. The snowfall began so gently it could only be seen under the streetlamps. Silent, lambent emanation.”

There are also scenes of deep feeling.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Where were you happiest? What was your favorite food when you were a child? What was the first book that made you cry? I want to hear everything, don’t leave out a thing.”

“That will take forever,” she said.

“I hope so,”

However the novel skips around erratically from place to place, from time to time, from situation to situation, and from person to person. This skipping around left this reader almost entirely confused, except for those beautiful images that are presented. Neither the times nor the places nor the characters are well-grounded in significant detail so that the occasional lovely or profound image that is presented seems to be unearned.

There are so many characters, and we skip around from time to time and from place to place so we never really get to know these people who are having such profound lovely thoughts. We can appreciate the beauty of what they are seeing or saying, but we cannot really empathize with these under-developed people.

Sometimes the prose gets too abstract, too diffuse, not tied to anything real or concrete.

“Loneliness is not emptiness but negation, with all its agonizing precision, its absoluteness; exact, active; in every depth of detail, it is the inverse of love, the dark replica of love.”

What exactly does that mean?

There are many fleeting fictional characters in ‘Held’, and towards the end the real person Marie Curie makes an appearance. Madame Marie Curie, discoverer with her husband Pierre, of the radioactive element radium and the only winner of two Nobel Prizes in both the fields of Chemistry and Physics. Soon after she won her first Nobel Prize in 1911, it was revealed that Marie Curie was involved in a year-long affair with another male physicist not her husband, which was a major scandal at the time.

“Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?” asked Marie.

“I think perhaps we might,” said Hertha.

“That’s a dark thought,” said Marie. She hesitated. “I won’t believe it.”

For me, ‘Held’ was just too diffuse and abstract and not grounded sufficiently in everyday reality for me to give it a high grade. However I will end with another of the special lines from the novel.

He was fully awake now.

“Sometimes I think I see her too,” Peter said, “out of the corner of my eye. If you can see a feeling.”

“Yes, I think you can.”

Grade:    B-