Off course /

A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION not getting written is never just a doctoral dissertation not getting written. It's always a stand-in for something more consequential (take it from a former grad student who knows). But when we encounter Cressida (Cress) Hartley, the protagonist of Michelle Huneven's fourth novel, "Off Course," she doesn't realize this yet. In fact, she has just persuaded her parents to allow her to live in their vacation cabin in California's Sierra Nevada for "three months free and clear," so that she can "bang... out" her dissertation in economics. The 28-year-old, high-achieving Cress comes from cautious, stingy stock, a foundation that gives her a natural aptitude for her field: Her father is a "traumatized victim of the Great Depression," and his "fears and obsessions had imprinted her with thought patterns that, superficially at least, were indistinguishable from the mind-set of a trained economist: What is given up to get this? What is the true cost? Whose self-interest is going to prevail?" This sort of coldblooded perspective is especially suited to the Reagan era, just dawning as the novel begins, and though nominally a Keynesian, Cress seems ready to ride the rah-rah early-'80s wave of personal accomplishment toward conventional success in the outside world - if not in academia, which she's grown tired of, then in the "wild-and-woolly marketplace." The fact that moving forward proves much more difficult than expected for Cress, however, is the jumping-off point from which Huneven, in this skillful and perceptive novel, explores the dangers as well as the boons of leaving the easy stasis of one's habits behind to veer "off course, into the woods." Settling into her parents' A-frame, Cress brings to mind a heroine of late-19th-century regionalist American literature - an urbanite on a break in a quaint backwoods community, taking stock of her rustic surroundings from a safe, privileged remove. As a seemingly temporary diversion from her dissertation, Cress begins an affair with Jakey, the middle-aged but still virile local lodge owner who has only one book in his living room, "a Bible with a crocheted cover on a swirly wrought-iron stand," and whom Cress casts as a character in her formulaic city girl's fantasy, "a large laughing woodsman to carry her into the wilderness." Cress's trite grasp of her situation, however, is soon challenged. When Jakey abruptly drops her, it initially seems that her longing will resolve itself quite easily. After all, "supply exceeds demand" when it comes to men on the mountain, as she tells her friend Tillie, so much so that she never has to pay for a drink when she goes out. But things begin to shift when Cress meets Quinn, an enigmatic, married carpenter. At first, she retains her detachment, her emotional strictness, her belief that this was just a "little love affair with the working class," as Tillie flippantly terms it. When the entanglement becomes more involved, however, Cress's shrewd aloofness disintegrates, and the book becomes a complex portrait of a woman under the influence: of love, then obsession. This depiction of femininity might read as regressive in a torch-singer kind of way. But I think that Huneven is using Cress's romantic yearning as a hinge to make a larger critical point, suggesting it is painful but necessary to break through one's superficial habits - those nonfeeling rituals of achievement - and find a truer path in the world. Cress's inability to write her dissertation while on the mountain becomes its own sort of critique: a rebellious gesture against ingrained convention. She tells Quinn that over the course of her studies she realized she had "come to hate economics," because she "had to ignore so much reality to seem at all systematic." What she would like to be, if she had the talent for it, is a landscape painter: "I'd love to look hard at the natural world all day and make my feeble facsimile. It's such a noble, old-fashioned profession, like writing novels." As Cress takes a turn into the woods, then slowly and painfully finds her way out of them, Huneven's novel, too, charts the shifting reality of its protagonist's emotional landscape. NAOMI FRY has written for the London Review of Books and n+1, among other publications.

Cressida Hartley, struggling with finishing her doctoral dissertation and a general sense of being unmoored, decamps to her family's California mountain cabin in Huneven's latest, an understated yet deeply compelling novel. It is the Reagan era, and 28-year-old Cress seeks shelter from the varied trip wires of academia, relationships, and the bone-deep slices to the psyche dealt by family. Shaped by her father's Depression-baby parsimony and her mother's warden-like watchfulness over her two daughters during their impressionable teen years, Cress lets loose on the mountain as she discovers lovers, friends, and the long future shadows cast by careless decisions made in an instant. Subconsciously in search of the nearly unbearable sweetness of being known and adored, she lets her affections travel from an exuberant man whose failing is to adore every woman who crosses his path to a married father of two whose very existence will permanently alter her sense of self. Seemingly quiet and unexciting at first glance, the story and the resonant cast of characters soon barrel through with their deeply human nuances, all communicated in Huneven's captivating language. An utterly absorbing read.--Trevelyan, Julie Copyright 2014 Booklist

For readers unfamiliar with Huneven's previous novels, such as Blame, Cressida Hartley may seem at first like a romance heroine. When Cress moves temporarily into her family's cabin in the Sierras in the early 1980s, ostensibly to finish her economics dissertation, Jakey-the stereotypical burly backwoodsman-immediately poses a distraction. But their tryst doesn't lead to a happily ever after: it proves to be only a prologue to the main story. After Jakey loses interest in her, Cress finds a less likely romantic partner in Quinn, a somber carpenter grappling with his father's suicide who has been married for 19 years. With unflinching emotional honesty, Huneven chronicles their passionate four-year affair, during which time Cress's family and friends urge her to leave the mountain and begin her career. Instead, she allows her personality to be subsumed into Quinn's. The tension between the two is slowly pulled taut, until it finally snaps: Cress runs up against Quinn's sense of familial duty. Underlying the plot is an uncomfortable assumption that happiness is determined by relationships-Cress's accomplishments are so briefly noted (her Ph.D., a high-powered job), that they seem to be an afterthought. But while Huneven's latest will likely disappoint romantics, Cress makes for an eerily relatable and heartbreaking protagonist. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

An extended, excruciating romance with a married man derails a California graduate student in Huneven's latest (Blame, 2009, etc.). In the fall of 1981, Cressida Hartley moves up to her family's weekend cabin in the Sierras with the hope of finishing her Ph.D. dissertation, even though she's grown increasingly unenthusiastic about pursuing a career in economics. A lighthearted fling with the owner of the local lodge introduces her to the close-knit, not to say gossipy, community of year-round residents, who are censorious when Cress embarks on a dangerous relationship with Quinn Morrow, a married carpenter. He's still reeling from the suicide of his father 10 months earlier, and Cress is the first person to notice. Sylvia, Quinn's wife, is fragile and always needs to be sheltered; Quinn is yearning for someone who will listen to him. Huneven creates a detailed, moving portrait of two people who initially think they can have a no-strings affair but are drawn into something much more serious and damaging. Quinn leaves Sylvia, goes back, leaves again, goes back again; Cress ignores her dissertation, takes a job waitressing and waits around for him to make up his mind, alarming her friends and family with her deteriorating emotional and physical state. Huneven's well-written narrative is emotionally credible, although Cress' passivity becomes frustrating in the novel's final third: She is reduced to the role of a mistress, waiting haplessly for occasional visits, as several years fly by. The final pages show her finishing her dissertation, embarking on a freelance journalism career and rebuilding her life, without ever losing "the feeling that a part of her had been left behind, as if her soul were invisibly married to Quinn." The painfully sad ending suggests that he may have felt the same, but it didn't do either of them any good. Sensitive, reflective and uncomfortably true to life, with a wonderfully rich cast of supporting characters.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.