In the Direction of the Sun

Madison’s second romance (after 2016’s Personal Foul) showcases her imaginative strengths and betrays her technical weaknesses. Massachusetts-based protagonists Alex McKenzie and Cate Conrad are 30-somethings united in their distance: Cate lied to Alex and ran away to an artist’s shack in Provincetown, and Alex gave up her much-loved teaching job in Stockbridge to hike the Appalachian Trail. Amid every enticement to distraction, they remain focused on writing unsent letters to one another and agonizing over what happened between them and what went wrong. For readers who love a deep character dive, this is the jam. But Madison has chosen a difficult prose form comprising time hops, flashbacks, and dreams, and she struggles to guide readers through the shifts; there is a constant need to disentangle when the various parts of the story take place, because nearly every sentence is cast in simple past tense. Most of the characters are female and talk about other women; Madison does her best to juggle pronouns, but it can be impossible to discern who is saying what about whom. With so much static in the technique, full immersion in Madison’s often-beautiful descriptions remains out of reach. (Mar.)