As a ravenous reader, I consume varied fare. I usually have a door-stop of a Victorian classic or one of the Russians on the go, as well as a contemporary master - Munro and Strout are favourites - not to mention a slender volume of poetry, Tsvetaeva or Rilke, to sustain the soul, followed by a dense, rich dessert, perhaps the latest Anita Shreve novel.
I have read nearly all of Shreve's 15 novels with the same guilty pleasure I enjoy consuming Belgian chocolate: Her work is tempting and tough to put down. But I confess that I read her furtively and feel sheepish about displaying her oeuvre on my library shelf. Am I a literary snob?
Here's the real question: Is Shreve any good?
Some critics snub Shreve's work, perhaps because she is prolific, appeals to a mass market audience, and understands the lure of a page-turning plot. However, she is a deft craftsperson and a master of psychological suspense, gifts amply displayed in her latest novel, A Change in Altitude.
Shreve journeys far from her usual craggy coastal landscape in New England to Kenya during the late 1970s, where newlyweds Margaret and Patrick plan to spend a year. Patrick, a physician specializing in equatorial medicine, will open free clinics throughout Kenya, while Margaret works as a photojournalist, capturing the country's complex cultural mores.
The story unfolds from Margaret's perspective - visual, highly focused - characterized by lean, staccato sentences adorned by the occasional wide-angle evocation of Nairobi and its surroundings in "saturated color, too many bright hues overwhelming the senses."
Through artful juxtaposition, Shreve depicts the collision of cultures, the clash between haves and have-nots, between posh expatriate suburbs and squalid shantytowns. In an early scene, a mother of three holds out a tin cup to passersby while her youngest child, dressed only in a dirty shirt, squats and defecates on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, across the street, American tourists count canisters of film as they await the zebra-striped minibuses which will take them on safari. While Margaret can enjoy a tall glass of iced tea at a café, an African woman cannot without being asked to leave; if she is alone, she is assumed to be a prostitute.
An irreversible crisis and its reverberations form the core of A Change in Altitude. (All of Shreve's novels possess such a pivotal event, which provides cohesion and drives the narrative.) In Shreve's strongest work, such as The Weight of Water, a finalist for England's Orange Prize, the climactic revelation is both startling and inevitable. In less successful novels, Body Surfing and The Last Time They Met, the shocker is forced and strains credulity, a surprise jerry-rigged upon a contrived notion, narrative and characters forced to fit the preconceived structure.
The catastrophe in A Change of Altitude works. An English couple and their Dutch friends invite Margaret and Patrick to join them on a climbing expedition up Mount Kenya, a perilous, 17,000-foot ascent that claims four or five lives each year. On the climb, a momentary lapse results in a terrible accident.
The climb is superbly dramatized and the point where I could not put the novel down. This is the Sisyphean hike from hell, where the trekkers have to conquer the worst of Mount Kenya: A buffalo threatens to charge; a vertical bog, virtually alive, sucks at boots and knees; steep scree results in two slides backward for every three steps forward; a glacier menaces; and rats crawl over hands and feet in the sleeping huts.
In her nod to widespread accessibility, Shreve interprets the action, failing to give her readers credit. A surfeit of foreshadowing and a mound of mountain metaphors also puncture the novel's power: "Well, isn't that the whole point?" Diana, their British friend, asks. "To get there?"
Her husband Arthur counters, "I should have thought the climb itself was the point."
A Change in Altitude is dark, like most of Shreve's novels, and unleavened by humour, which does not mesh with her emotional intensity and unvarying earnest tone; nonetheless, the story remains absorbing.
In the aftermath of the climb, Margaret and Patrick face a new mountain to scale: repairing their marriage. Margaret feels responsible for the tragedy on Mount Kenya, and her marriage hits the rocks. Like the big scree, it's going to be a few steps up, followed by an inevitable backward slide.
Shreve delves deeply into marriage, a rich, bottomless subject. Extremity, which tends to bring out the best and worst in people, pares back the layers of Margaret's and Patrick's characters. It becomes clear that they barely knew one another before the climb. What's more, they have a lot to learn about themselves as individuals. Whether their marriage will survive provides additional narrative tension.
Margaret decides to take a job at a daily newspaper, photographing the people of Kenya. She hopes that the country will heal her and her marriage. She thinks of Africa: "It had been her constant companion for nearly a year, teaching her, scolding her, enveloping her. It was in her lungs and blood now. She'd thought she wanted to absorb Africa, but the continent had absorbed Margaret."
Whatever one thinks of Shreve's literary merit, she grapples with subjects and themes that matter. In a tragedy, can blame or responsibility be assigned? How does one move on from a reckless moment that has led to irreversible consequences? Can visitors, however well-intentioned, make any difference to Kenya's ongoing political and economic struggles?
A Change in Altitude is a novel of suspense and character, which offers an introduction to Kenya's history and complex ethnic cultures, but to this reader, not a work of enduring literary value. The best novels gather in one's mind and reverberate long after the covers are closed; they burrow in, whereas A Change in Altitude is a well-crafted entertainment likely to vanish almost as quickly as the morning mists on Mount Kenya.
Ami Sands Brodoff welcomes suggestions for sustaining winter reads - as well as a few frothy confections. Her latest novel is The White Space Between, winner of the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction. She blogs frequently at chez-ami.blogspot.com.