Practical and whimsical
IN HOVERING FLIGHT
By Joyce Hinnefeld
288 pp Unbridled Books $24.95
Reviewed by Julie McGuire
I loved Joyce Hinnefeld’s debut novel In Hovering Flight so much that I’m at a loss for the right words to adequately portray it. How to describe this unusual novel that is part field notes of a radical environmentalist, part ornithology lecture (complete with beautiful Latin names for birds like Zenaida Macroura, more commonly known as Mourning Dove), part unconventional love story, and part confessional? In a word—breathtaking. I’ve never been one to get out the binoculars to identify the winged creatures waking me up each morning. It just might be time to start.
In Hovering Flight begins with the death of Addie Kavanaugh, a famous bird artist and environmental activist. Her friends and family gather to mourn the remarkable, strange, and complex woman they love as they decide whether they can fulfill her dying wish. What Addie asks is blatantly illegal, but each of them, for myriad reasons, feels compelled to respect her request. The wish itself is slowly revealed throughout the novel as alternating narrators come to peace with Addie’s death.
Tom Kavanaugh first met Addie when she was a student in his Biology of the Birds course. Ornithologist and professor, Tom is popular with his college students for his optimism, his handsomeness (it is mainly young women who elect the course), and his passion for birds (particularly their song):
These marvelous creatures with their hollow bones...did you know their bones are hollow? It’s true! Hollow bones. Imagine what this means. Strength and lightness. Flight and surety. They hover too magnificently between the practical and the whimsical, the rational and the exquisitely nonsensical, for any student of their physiology and habitat and history to dare to linger too long at either pole, the strictly ‘scientific’ or the purely poetic.’
When he meets Addie, he immediately senses that she is different from the other students. She is captivated not by the handsome professor, but by the birds themselves, furiously drawing them to capture their beauty. It is that shared passion for the “marvelous creatures” that draws Addie and Tom to each other:
For Addie, who’d been wondering, at that moment, what in the world she was doing, this bird’s song was a revelation. She paused, gazing up into the tangle of branches, hoping for a rustle of a wing. She did not yet know that thrilling sound as the song of the wood thrush; for her, at that moment, it was nothing less than the voice of all her unnamed longing.
With Addie as his inspiration, Tom writes A Prosody of Birds, an anti-war classic perfected by Addie’s lifelike sketches of the birds. How can he deny her dying wish when it was Addie who completed him at every stage of his life?
Scarlet, Tom and Addie’s daughter, named for the Scarlet Tanager, an American songbird known for its vibrancy, has an unusual childhood. With a professor father and artist mother, she feels alienated from her peers, who measure success in material things. Her introspective nature leads her to poetry, where she can write the world as she sees it. Although she knows her parents love her, she feels like a third wheel at times. As a teenager, she leaves home to stay with Addie’s best friend and her family. Apart from Addie, Scarlet begins to really understand and admire her mother. In the end, she, too, cannot bear to say no to her mother’s dying wish.
Perhaps the most compelling voice comes from Addie herself, through the field notes she first kept as Tom Kavanaugh’s student and continued throughout her life. Among the field descriptions of weather conditions, geographic locations, and scientific birds, Addie opens her heart:
30 May 1965. Sunday. Fisherman’s cottage on Haupt Bridge Road, Burnham, PA (Near the convergence of Little and Nisky Creeks, 1 mi. from campus), where Addie Sturmer and Tom Kavanaugh first made love, on a lumpy old mattress below a nearly full moon while a screech owl circled overhead. With sweet abandon. Listening to frogs. With no apparent cover of clouds. Picturing a life spent together, and with birds, while they stared into each other’s eyes.
As the journey of Addie’s life unfolds—artist, strident environmentalist, taxidermist, angry cancer-sufferer—Hinnefeld paints characters and challenges that resonated with me, and will resonate with readers who appreciate strong writing about issues that face all of us—birth, death, alienation, passion, tough choices, and fear of failure.
A short story writer and first-time novelist, Hinnefeld certainly found her wings with In Hovering Flight. She must, like the birds, have hollow bones. Her novel is strong and light, hovering between the practical and whimsical, not lingering too long in the scientific or poetic.
Julie McGuire, fiction editor of The Internet Review of Books, is a litigation paralegal. Her personal essays and poems have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and several small periodicals. She and her family live in Virginia.
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