Jill McCorkle’s ‘Hieroglyphics’ explores the intricate passages of memory, time and love

“HIEROGLYPHICS” by Jill McCorkle (Algonquin, 320 pages, $27).

“We are all haunted by something – something we did or didn’t do – and the passing years either add to the weight or diminish it.” Those are the words of Lil, the loving but wounded woman at the heart of Jill McCorkle’s new novel, “Hieroglyphics.” The tormenting power of memory, and conflicting desires to escape and interrogate the past, shape the lives of all the characters in this poignant, deeply human story.

Lil and her husband, Frank, are an elderly couple who’ve left Massachusetts to spend their last years in North Carolina, near their grown daughter. For Lil, who was once a dance teacher, the move feels like exile. She misses New England and can’t reconcile herself to Southern culture, including “the tea, thick with sugar and God knows what; you can feel your arteries closing in resistance.” For Frank, though, the move is a return. A Massachusetts native, he spent part of his boyhood in this same North Carolina community after his parents, headed home from Florida, were in a terrible train accident nearby. His father died, and his mother ultimately married the local man who came to her aid after the wreck.

The loss of a parent is a trauma Lil and Frank share. Lil’s mother died in a Boston nightclub fire when Lil was still in grade school. (McCorkle draws on real events for these two plot details: the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire and a 1943 rail disaster in Robeson County, North Carolina.) She and Frank are both haunted by a desire to make sense of their enduring pain but respond in different, sometimes incompatible ways. Lil is the family recorder, a habitual jotter and journal keeper who has for many years set down her unvarnished thoughts and memories with the aim of passing all of it, the bad parts included, on to the next generation.