Fresh out of grad school in Michigan, on the brink of despair, directionless, David worries his parents. They don't know how to heal him. His doctor suggests that he needs to gain some perspective, and possibly a relocation would help. Maybe there is such a thing as a geographical cure? Snowy, grey Buffalo is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of a curative place, but maybe time with his cousin Flip will help David to forget his own troubled past. But as it turns out, Flip's life and state of mind is even unsteadier than his own. Suddenly enlisted to take care of his cousin and to even fill in for him at his job, David falls into a new life and a new way of seeing the world. A world where, come to think of it, he doesn't mind the snow.
Bump paints with the novel’s primary hue: melancholy, which, like a blizzard, can be desolate and romantic at once ... While Bump’s own talent for teasing out the poetry of everyday life is less effective in dialogue — characters tend to speak in pithy witticisms, a found poetry that can feel whimsical for its own sake — David’s narration routinely has a depth of insight, about identity, the fragility of family and the tragedies into which we’re all born. This is delivered with such elegant ease that it sneaks up on readers, who may find themselves tearing up, as I did more than once.
Bump structures the novel around balance and imbalance—David’s biracial parentage, the pull between snow and sun, his mother’s devotion to nonfiction against his father’s love of fiction. These dualities at times steady him but mostly threaten to tip him over, revealing how inheritance runs deeper than the obvious, and the life we’re handed isn’t always the one we need.
Not every scene lands, but it’s a compassionate portrait of a man slogging through 'academic emotional molasses' to something like true feeling. A quirky but affecting story of reshaping oneself outside of one’s parents’ mold.
