The End of Always

In a first novel as lyrical as it is harrowing, Davenport (author of the memoir The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes) explores the darker side of the American dream and women’s exclusion from its freedoms. Marie Reehs, the child of German immigrants, comes of age in Waukesha, Wis., in the first decade of the 20th century. When she’s 17, Marie loses her mother to a gruesome injury; though the death is deemed an accident, awareness of her father’s violence make the naturally questioning, even visionary girl doubt that convenient explanation. Later, working grueling days as a laundress, Marie reencounters August Bethke, one of the passersby who helped bring her mother home as she was bleeding to death from a stab wound. Soon trysting with him in the woods at night, she finds herself in conflict with her family, her employer (who begins to make passes at her), her coworkers, and her fellow townspeople, who look down on her affair with August. Her elemental passion seems to promise a less constricted future, but Marie finds that neither her family’s painful legacy nor her own female vulnerability is easily escaped. Davenport shapes her story—drawn from her own family history—with scrupulous patience, deftly juxtaposing striking images of the Midwestern landscape with evocations of Marie’s vivid inner world. (May)