RANGE OF LIGHT
By Valerie Miner
Zoland Books, 227 pages, $14 paper
In Valerie Miner’s seventh novel, “Range of Light,” set in the High Sierra of California, the author examines what endures in human relationships. Put to this test is the uneasy friendship of Kath Peterson and Adele Ward-Jones, friends since childhood but separated by economics, life choices and geography. As the point of view alternates between the two middle-age women, Miner questions whether their friendship can endure. In the rugged High Sierra, they reaffirm their abiding interest and love for each other, even as they probe age-old grievances.
While both women shared early experiences in California, Adele, a highly regarded feminist scholar, made an early defection when she chose to attend Wellesley, then married a Yale graduate, had children and created her life on the opposite coast. Kath, meanwhile, stayed in California, remained close to her working-class family, dropped out of college, quietly came out as a lesbian and had a string of socially significant but low-paying jobs in the community. Kath is apprehensive about her straight friend’s sophistication, success and traditional family life. Adele, on the other hand, wonders whether she can fully understand and appreciate her secretive and sometimes resentful friend. Reunited after 25 years for a week of hiking, both women use the time to reevaluate life choices in the clean but thin and unfamiliar air of the mountains.
As they hike from site to site, they wonder why their friendship has so reliably failed at crucial moments. Kath recalls her difficult college years involving an unwanted pregnancy, feelings of inferiority and loneliness. Similarly, Adele questions why she never heard from Kath when she married Lou, when her chronically depressed mother died or when her beloved younger sister, Sari, committed suicide. As the physical terrain and its rigors reveal untapped strengths in both women, their week together provokes each to explore tender and dangerous areas of their relationship. Can friendship endure despite decades of silence and estrangement? Can sympathy overcome resentment?
As the California high country of John Muir is illumined by Miner’s lovely detailed descriptions, so the book shows how emotions, memory, analysis and unexpected events clarify the women’s situation. As tempers flare, as pain is given and received, as accommodations and truces are struck, the enduring friendship of Kath and Adele proves to be the greatest natural wonder of the trip.
Miner has a keen eye for detail. Her perceptive descriptions make the high country a significant character in the women’s quest for renewed understanding: “A sliver of moon was rising over Kuna Crest, whispering into the shoulder of the mountain as it ascended.” At the same time, Adele is examining what she has lost by leaving her birthplace and venturing East: “Although we both cherished this place, (Kath’s) connection was deeper. I felt a little jealous of her passion for the High Country.” As Adele considers the differences between them, she probes her own habits and fears: “I had come to see my gregariousness as a crutch to cope with the stress and distract from anxiety. Chat, chat, chat. . . . During the years that separated me from Kath’s quiet friendship, I had learned the sedative powers of words.” Meanwhile, Kath is evaluating her friend’s fact-finding tendencies: “Unlike Adele, I wasn’t interested in getting to the bottom of things. The bottom of things was inevitably mucky and often dangerous.”
With skill and assurance, Miner portrays the range of small but significant moments that tenderly renew the friendship. Each modest consideration and adjustment of thought is given a careful vocabulary, changeable as the light and weather conditions that surround the women. However, when the novel deals with memories, a necessary subtext to the friendship, a strained shorthand results. Important past events are often sketchily revisited. The reader gains little insight, for instance, into why Adele’s sister committed suicide or why Kath’s Vietnam-era boyfriend became abusive toward her. In this clipped manner of relating past events, issues such as battering, incest and mental illness seem more like trendy accessories than necessary equipment. More than the altitude or physical challenges of the trip, the breathlessness of Adele and Kath is created by the hard work necessary to weave the past into the present story. Of course, the burden of a writer is to move the action forward, but memory needs to take on its proper weight. What past burdens these women carry from campsite to cliff to scenic overlook might have been elucidated more skillfully.
Still, Miner has done a commendable job of exploring what holds people together. She understands complication well and can live with the contradiction that secrecy, grievances and slights are as important a fabric as empathy and concern in sustaining a friendship. How Adele and Kath understand themselves and their choices makes for a satisfying journey. The reader is privileged to accompany these resilient women during their week of losing and rediscovering each other in the High Sierra.
