In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld (Unbridled Books, $24.95,
publishing date: September 16)
In Hovering Flight is the title of Joyce Hinnefeld’s debut novel. It’s also a true, technical term for a method of flight, which most notably happens with hummingbirds. In hovering flight, a bird generates its own lift through rapid wing beats. With hummers, we’re talking up to 80 iridescently blurred beats per second.
It occurred to me that people, too, sometimes experience a kind of hovering flight, albeit not nearly so gracefully. At least it feels that way to me sometimes when I’m struggling with parenting; writing; friendships; or, oh, any number of things. I might still be up and about, and even making it look good, but for whatever reason—caution, procrastination, fear or worry—I’m not making much movement forward.
Eventually, of course, I move on to the next flower.
In Hovering Flight lends itself to mindful wandering like this. There’s plenty here to think about. Hinnefeld explores a variety of subjects: mothers and daughters; husbands and wives; women’s friendships; cancer; the environment; conservation; art and artists; writing and, yes, birds. Like with the hummingbirds, there’s a lot going on at once. But it works because this ultimately is a story of love—for each other and the (often fragile) world we share.
The story starts with the death of the famous bird artist Addie Kavanaugh. She’s dying of cancer. Her 34-year-old daughter is there for her passing, as are her life-long friends, Cora and Lou. So is her husband, Tom, a world-renowned ornithologist. Addie has chosen to die in Cora’s house on the New Jersey shore. The home she shared with Tom and Scarlet, a ramshackle cottage near a college campus in southeastern Pennsylvania, is too full of memories and history. This is where Addie fell in love with birds and art and Tom. This is where Scarlet spent her wildly carefree childhood. Besides, in the last 10 years or so there, even the birdsong along the creek seems to make Addie angry and sad.
The birdsong has changed over the years, and Addie is convinced that this is because of what’s happening to the environment around her—and everywhere, really. She spent the latter part of her life trying to effect environmental reforms through her art, and she has one more chance to make a stand. But she’ll need Tom and Scarlet to make it happen.
Meandering back and forth in time, part of this story is cleverly told in a series of field notebooks, the first of which Addie complied when she was a young college student in Tom’s class. He initially fell in love with her words, which simply but eloquently described her newfound and growing appreciation and understanding of birds, and then with the girl herself. Scarlet has seen most of her mother’s notes over the years. She will get these first field notebooks when Addie dies, and then, she hopes, she finally will be able to truly understand her mother.
But to understand Addie, is to understand birds and their crucial place in our world. The book opens with Addie’s sighting of a Cuvier’s kinglet—a bird long thought to be extinct—if, indeed, it ever really existed at all outside of John James Audubon’s imagination. In her last field notebook, she writes: “No sign of the cerulean warbler this morning, I’m afraid. But there it was again, Audubon’s wren, on a branch of one of those towering oaks. It isn’t possible, yet there it was. A ruby-crowned kinglet, but with a golden-crowned’s head stripe. The Cuvier’s kinglet.”
Tom didn’t see this bird, but he’s not disputing his wife’s claim. They are both experts—decades before, as a bird-artist-and-ornithologist team, they published the environmentalist and antiwar classic, A Prosody of Birds. The book was a mix of beautiful artist’s plates and poetic examination of birdsongs. But as far as this bird is concerned, there is reason to doubt both of them.
Whether Addie actually saw the kinglet or not becomes secondary to this novel in the end. That’s because Hinnefeld, with her entertaining and enlightening story, reveals a great deal about human nature and the much larger world we share with the creatures around us. It’s a remarkable read that will make you think.
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