Fire and Ice

After circling the dark secret of her incestuous relationship with her father in her first two novels, “Thicker Than Water” and “Exposure,” Kathryn Harrison confronted her demons head-on in the memoir “The Kiss.” Anyone who’s read this eviscerating memoir about her affair with her father won’t be surprised by the icy intensity of her latest novel, “The Seal Wife.” Harrison is a beautiful stylist, a master of spareness in the service of over-the-top obsessions.

In her recent fiction, she has gone to enormous lengths--mental and geographical--to escape her personal story, setting “Poison” in 17th century Spain during the Spanish Inquisition and “The Binding Chair” in late 19th and early 20th century China. She is skilled at seamlessly incorporating research into tales of sexual compulsions.

But no matter how far Harrison ranges, her creepy sensibility travels with her. Despite exotic locales and grisly historical eras, she ends up not so much escaping her private horrors as mirroring them. The obsessive love and detached, mute sex she nailed in her memoir keep turning up under different guises.

She is drawn to things that make most people squirm--whether incest, foot-binding or her daughter’s lice, which she wrote about in a memorable New Yorker article. Her trademark is to examine these repellent subjects minutely, without flinching, until she transforms them through craft and precision into objects of morbidly beautiful fascination. Harrison is a writer who might make you gasp but rarely will make you laugh.

In “The Seal Wife,” the main character is a weatherman stationed in Anchorage who becomes smitten with a native woman as mute and elusive as the selkie of Celtic legend: a gray seal that strips her pelt and becomes human for one day a year, or as long as her sealskin is kept hidden from her.

Bigelow Greene is a 26-year-old scientist sent north by the United States government to establish a weather observatory. The year is 1915, and Anchorage is a frozen frontier railroad town of some 3,000 men and a few hundred women, evoking in its extremes of deprivation Chaplin’s “Gold Rush”--minus the humor. Bigelow is used to storms but unprepared for the 20-hour mosquito-ridden days of summer, the frigid 20-hour nights of winter, the incessant howling of sled dogs, “like hideous hymns to the devil,” and the numbing year-round loneliness in this “land that will insist on its strangeness.”

Bigelow’s salary is insufficient to cover his basic necessities, so he finds himself strapped physically as well as emotionally. Under these circumstances, it is small wonder that a willfully mute native known as the Aleut becomes so all-consumingly important to him. This bizarrely impassive woman, with her black eyes, black braid and three black lines tattooed across her chin, is an enigma who drives Bigelow into a frenzy by her ultimate inaccessibility.

From the first time he visits her hut, bearing a dead rabbit as an offering, she allows him to copulate with her, yet he is frustrated by her rejection of affection and all gifts other than fresh kill. “He’s getting what he hoped, he tells himself, but it isn’t at all what he expected, and a desolation seizes him. He’s not joined to her, he can’t reach her.”

As usual, Harrison’s descriptions of sex are severely erotic. She brings the same analytic precision to bear on her characters’ odd couplings as she does on Bigelow’s other object of obsession, the box kite he is building to send his weather equipment aloft and record atmospheric conditions miles above Earth. Harrison’s restraint pays off, enabling her to chart the progress of Bigelow’s passions without becoming tedious.

When the Aleut vanishes without a trace, Bigelow reels with loneliness. He tries to distract himself with prostitutes, movies, dances and his kite. Eventually, he finds “another focus for his longing,” another mute, but this woman uses her silence not to preserve her integrity but to heighten her mysteriousness and entrap Bigelow.

Tension builds incrementally in Harrison’s short chapters, written in a stripped-down present tense for immediacy. Her novel features as much white space on its pages as the snow-and-fog blanketed territory they depict. By evoking the legend of the seal wife who can never be happy on land and by reminding us that “tragedy is humankind’s one talent,” Harrison leads us to expect disasters. She delivers several violent outbursts, including a life-and-death struggle with the wind and a nasty run-in with a seal. But the most surprising aspect of this mesmerizing tale about passion’s capability to empower and deflate is Harrison’s subversion of our worst expectations.

How astonishing that Harrison, the doyenne of darkness, has her characters happily flying kites while, on the other side of the world, she reminds us, a war-torn Europe is “digging itself into rat-infested trenches.” Call it the wonder of love or just the power of amatory obsession.

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From ‘The Seal Wife’

In the dream, he dismembers her. It’s easy enough; he’s learned from watching her skin and cut up game. And there is no blood. Instead, a stream of writing spills from her veins, letters and runes and symbols he doesn’t understand. They pour out in order, like a Weather Bureau teletype, a cipher he is to translate into meaning.

Except he can’t fathom the writing inside the woman. He’s killed her for nothing.

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November 19, 1916: 13 degrees; barometer 29.90, falling; .09 precip, Wind: ESE 22 mph. November 30, 1916: 13 degrees; barometer 30.00, falling, Trc. precip, W: NE 27 mph. December 2, 1916: 2 degrees; barometer 29.80, falling, 1.02 precip, W: 0 mph. December 17, 1917: -4 degrees, barometer 29.60, falling. 0 precip. W: SE 3.5 mph.

Barometer falling, barometer falling. How can it be that the barometer is always falling? Wouldn’t it have to rise sometimes? Years later, remembering his second winter in Anchorage, Bigelow’s impression will be that the pressure continued impossibly to plummet, and that the long nights were (every one of them, despite notations to the contrary) unrelieved by the rising of the moon or the appearance of stars.

*

He scrimps on food in order to drag home another case of kerosene, pulling his sled carefully over the frozen ground. Still, the runners find a slick patch, or they catch on a stone, the sled tips, the box skids. One bottle shatters noiselessly and its golden contents leak away, leaving an iridescent trail in his wake, a prismatic oily sheen on the snow’s blank face.

And when he crawls under the blankets on his bed, his dreams find another plotless monotony: he holds out his hands to catch a spilling flow, but it leaks through his fingers and is lost.