Karen Thompson Walker’s ‘The Age of Miracles,’ reviewed by Ron Charles
Walker’s middle-school narrator doesn’t give us that, and it’s a problem of execution, not with the limits of an adolescent heroine. Consider, for instance, the wit and tenderness of the young narrator in Karen Russell’salligator apocalypse, “Swamplandia!,” or the raw poetry from the girl who narrates Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones” as Hurricane Katrina moves in to devastate her world.
“The Age of Miracles” leaves us, instead, only with the typical tropes of tween anxiety set awkwardly alongside the death of the planet. Poor Julia must somehow cope with a new training bra and the destruction of the human race. That’s enough to make sixth grade a real bummer. We have to endure irony-free lines like “The Gulf Stream was slowing, and Gabby shaved her head.” Of course, the end of childhood can feel like the end of the world when you’re going through it — that’s the macabre comedy of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — but Walker wants to play this completely, deadly straight. Without more wit or wisdom to place that trauma in context, the metaphor feels overwrought.
(Random House) - ”The Age of Miracles: A Novel” by Karen Thompson Walker.
Julia’s parents are potentially interesting, but we don’t see much beyond their exteriors: stoic dad, fearful mom. What works best is a shadow story about the “real-timers”: radicals (and some orthodox Jews) who insist on living by the sun no matter how out of sync their lives eventually get with the clock-time majority. They’re the hippies of a dying world, wearing hemp necklaces and ragged jeans stained with spray paint. “The real-timers made the rest of us uncomfortable,” Julia says. “They too often slept while the rest of us worked. They went out when everyone else was asleep. They were a threat to the social order.”
Eventually, these weirdos in Julia’s neighborhood move into the desert to form a commune called “Circadia,” where the residents are “hardworking but well rested.” In the cultural tension between these two groups, Walker comes closest to exploring interesting ideas about the natural and unnatural rhythms of our lives.
What “The Age of Miracles” would need to work, though, is more consistent quality. Its opening and closing chapters are fairly effective, but the bulk of the novel vacillates erratically between plain and melodramatic. Straining the ordinary pains of adolescence toward profundity, the story slowly winds down long before we get to the End.
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