Reading a book is like living a life. You start at the beginning, you move through experiences, and you eventually arrive at the end. Even as you read about, or meander through, the present moment, you are also always aware of your steady motion toward something else. In fact, your anticipation of what comes next—of what exists on the other side of the page, of what you might find in the future—keeps you reading. A novel about one woman stuck in her snow globe of a town that’s also, somehow, about the entire universe, Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass both adheres to and transcends this paradox.

The novel’s unnamed narrator is an aspiring radio astronomer; a gestational surrogate who is raising the triplets whose parents passed away before their birth; a person who has been surrounded by loss and who, now, is surrounded by a cluster of eccentric friends grappling with their own losses in a world devoid of stars and birds in the sky; and someone who struggles to reconcile the idea of “now” with her complicated past and the world’s unsure future. The narrator’s past, present, and future collide on the page as well:

Venus is 2.3 light minutes from Earth. The triplets were born on a Thursday. The Only Person I’ve Ever Loved bites her fingernails. […] To make a globe, you build the world one strip at a time. The piping plover would pretend to be injured to distract an enemy from its young. The Big Bang was the first and only cause, and its effect has been everything after. 

Set in an undetermined future, the novel’s form similarly catalyzes temporal disruption. Rather than chapters, the novel’s numbered sections begin at 180 and count down in a progression that echoes both the novel’s title and the narrator’s struggles with time (or her perceived lack of time and resources). As the narrator grapples with raising triplets in the face of climate disaster, limited economic means, and her own career aspirations, the reader remains conscious of story’s parallels with life—existing within the present moment, yet always looking ahead to the inevitable future and end. Simultaneously, though, questions regarding the peculiarity of time are centered. What does it mean to be present—especially when the past is always shaping the current moment, and thoughts of the future are always shaping individual and collective action? What does it truly mean, to live in the now? 

As the narrator tries to keep herself upright in a society plagued by environmental collapse, she begins to question other human constructions. Reality versus non-reality, for example, haunts the narrator. Because her lived experiences have been characterized by individual loss—of her father, of other loved ones, of the future she once dreamed of as a child—she fights to know what from her past is real, and what was simply never there at all. She also struggles to move beyond her own pain to recognize the pain of others. In this way, the narrator’s journey is not one of self-discovery so much as learning to decenter the self in order to care for loved ones who need support just as she does. As the novel develops, individual loss becomes entangled with the world’s collective losses—of an entire species, or of the ability to see stars in the night sky. Ultimately, Drager’s fictional considerations of individual and widespread grief ring true against the real backdrop of the present climate crisis. What is fact? What is fiction? As this novel’s narrator eventually finds out, “truth” is far more complicated than a single individual’s experience and perception. 

Indeed, at its core, this novel is about moving past preconceived notions to confront the fact that there is a world beyond the one we live in and experience ourselves. Consider the role of queerness, for instance. Drager ironically crafts a narrator who struggles to leave behind many of the social constructions she lives within—but she is also an openly queer woman. Likewise, there is a certain irony in how the narrator’s gay grandfathers are also makers of globes, physical structures representative of a world filled with its own harmful structures. By the novel’s end, the characters’ queerness coincides with the “queering” of norms and binaries in their town, a place with little tolerance for ambiguity. The town’s inhabitants, who at first cannot accept answers apart from YES or NO, come to understand that MAYBE is okay, too. As for the narrator, she eventually refuses to accept any labels at all. 

Of course, there are also parts of her constructed world from which the narrator is unable to free herself—one being the novel itself. The Avian Hourglass often veers down metatextual byways in which language, fictional representation, and the role of storytelling in the real world become central concerns. Near the end of the novel, Drager’s narrator reflects: 

I think of this act of breathing—how necessary, how fundamentally crucial—and how it is a little bit like a minor miracle that this ongoing event happens all the time […] It is kind of like the weather, ongoing to the point of being invisible. It’s only when we get scope and scale, when we get distance, that we can assess the climate.

Here, Drager seems to emphasize the importance of fiction—of telling our stories, of listening to others—in part because of fiction’s ability to reveal the hard-to-see facts of our lives. Perhaps fiction offers us the chance to change the scale of our current moment—and, as a result, adjust our path so that we do not reach “The Crisis” that Drager’s narrator lives through, or any other point of no return.

The Avian Hourglass reckons with the false binaries that structure so much of our lives, even as the novel exists as a construction of reality itself. But although Drager’s narrator is unable to escape from the novel’s world—just as we are not able to escape from ours—she is able to escape any sort of final end. In the “end,” there is no end at all. Instead, Drager’s novel mimics an hourglass in more ways than one, leaving readers with a choice: return to the beginning and begin the loop once more, or pause the clock and flip our world upside down before it’s too late for us too.

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Lindsey Drager is the author of three novels: The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc, 2015); The Lost Daughter Collective (Dzanc, 2017); and The Archive of Alternate Endings (Dzanc, 2019). These books have won a Shirley Jackson Award, been finalists for two Lambda Literary Awards, and are currently being translated into Spanish ​and Italian. Recent fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A 2020 NEA Fellowship recipient in Prose and winner of the 2022 Bard Fiction Prize, she is an assistant professor at the University of Utah and the fiction editor of West Branch.

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Court Ludwick is the author of These Strange Bodies (ELJ Editions, 2024) and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and can be found in EPOCH, Denver Quarterly, Variant Literature, Oxford Magazine, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. Her visual work has shown at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, and has appeared in publications like Harpy Hybrid Review and body fluids. Court holds an MA from Texas Tech University and is a current PhD student at the University of South Dakota. Find more of her work on Instagram and Twitter @courtludwick, and on www.courtlud.com.