Inverno by Cynthia Zarin

Inverno

By Cynthia Zarin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

Caroline is standing in the snow in Central Park, waiting for a call from Alastair on her cellphone. And if you don’t find that – just that, in and of itself – fascinating, then hoo boy, the 100 pages of Cynthia Zarin’s new novel Inverno are going to feel unending to you. 

Caroline is standing in the snow, waiting for long-time on-again and off-again friend and lover Alasdair, occasionally clutching her cellphone, sometimes wondering if she’s going to freeze to death and yet not ducking across the street to a deli or a cab stand. And while she’s waiting, she does two things: she recalls her patchwork relationship with Alasdair, and she free-associates from one word to another random word with no control and no focus at all. This means either she’s sustained an untreated traumatic head injury, or she's a female character in a work of contemporary fiction. 

Hint: it’s the latter (although considering how boring Inverno is, there’ll be many points where readers will hope for a brick or a falling piano in her general direction). Caroline is a version of Nathan Rabin’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl, only decked out in starchy pretentious prose; she’s a dreamy, whimsical creature (but a tigress in the bedroom, of course), and, disastrously, Zarin’s diaphanous little narrative adopts this tone. Virtually every noun or phrase this author uses reminds her of something else, and she describes those distractions in detail, every single time, whether or not they belong in the book’s narrative (another hint: they never actually do belong). 

This is grotesquely self-indulgent on the part of the author, and it shows up right away in the book. In case it hasn’t been mentioned, when the book opens, Caroline is hanging around Central Park in the snow, palming her cellphone, waiting for Alasdair to call. This sends Zarin into a digression about phones – cellular and rotary – that goes on for page after tedious page (“The root of the word ‘dial’ is dies, in Latin, ‘day’: dialis means daily. The medieval Latin is rotus dialis, the daily wheel, which evolved to mean any round dial over a plate,” and so on … and on and on …). As in all of these digressions, be they in English or sprinkled with the forced and extraneous Italian that starts with the book’s title, this long, long section is not anything Caroline herself would think – this is simply the author herself, dumping her random Internet searches onto the page. 

Dumping them there, and sometimes trying to make them sound profound. At one point while Caroline’s freezing to death (did we mention that she’s waiting in the snow in Central Park?), she thinks about rowan branches. This reminds her of seeing rowan branches when she was a Brownie as a child. This prompts a digression about Brownies (and maybe the color brown – the traumatized memory blurs …), but also about rowan branches and their place in Internet quote-nuggets like “When PL Travers came to visit Yeats, she arrived with an armful of rowan branches, and he remarked that one would have been enough.” And as bad as nonsense like this is, it often gets much, much worse, verging into genuine incoherence. At one point, for instance, Caroline briefly thinks of terror, or tericloth, or terriers or Teradyne Systems, and we’re off to the races:

The dictionary doesn’t link terror, which comes from the French, terroir, which means “great fear, dread” from the root “tre,” to shake, or tremble, and terra – earth – dry land, as in terra firma, but imbedded in terra firma is the dhea that the earth could shake. Anything can happen. One thing can become another. All children know this. 

While she’s waiting (in the snow, did we mention?), Caroline reflects, in a spasmodic and episodic fashion, on her on-again off-again relationship with Alasdair. The narrative loops and swirls from time period to time period, layering the various encounters between the book’s only two characters at different points in their lives, and Zarin is careful to blur and confuse things. “The last time Caroline saw Alastair was July 1987, on Central Park West, at the corner of Seventy-Second Street,” readers are told. “That is, the last time she saw him before, years later, she saw him again.” In part, this is no doubt done in order to make the novel represent a kind of poetic miasma, but whatever the authorial motive, Inverno requires a very high miasma-tolerance. What is truth, Zarin asks in one of the many meta-fictional passages in which she addresses the reader directly; “It doesn’t matter what you say today or tomorrow.” 

If you’re lucky while laboring through a poetic miasma, you might bark your shin against a random good passage now and again. Zarin’s sentences can sometimes be long and appealingly sinuous, almost predictably when she’s touching on the physical aspects of the love between Caroline, an angelic waif with scarcely a serious thought in her pretty little head, and Alasdair, whose back is corrugated with scars (not from anything dramatic – he just kept getting infected by poison ivy, for some impenetrable reason) and whose breath smells of whiskey. “Ten years later,” goes one such passage, “when Caroline put her arms around Alastair steamy from the shower, his hand at his throat where he had just loosened his tie, she felt the small lizard of fear, a tiny hunch, skitter across his shoulder blades, and she put her mouth on his shoulder and pressed it to the starched white shirt, picked up yesterday from the Korean dry cleaner on the corner, to his skin with her lips.” The prepositional phrases are deployed like knights in a chess game. 

But it’s not nearly enough. The occasional flash of effective prose can’t even begin to salvage this damp little scrapbook of half-baked ideas, half-drawn characters, and half-finished notions of plot or timing. When Zarin stops the pointless wandering long enough to blurt, “I invented Caroline, and I want it to end,” readers who are sick of standing around in the snow will agree completely.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News