“SWAN SONG: AN ODYSSEY” by Lisa Alther (Knopf, 240 pages, $27).
Forty-five years ago, Tennessee native Lisa Alther published her first novel, “Kinflicks,” a coming-of-age-in-the-1950s tale that John Leonard, writing in The New York Times in 1976, called “a very funny book, not at all savage, about serious matters, full of people one would like to meet, and oddly invigorating.”
It was a best-selling blockbuster. Since then, Alther has written a memoir, a history of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, an account of conversations between herself and the painter (and Picasso’s former mistress) Françoise Gilot and six more novels.
Her latest, “Swan Song: An Odyssey,” tells the story of a bereaved woman in her mid-60s who, unmoored by grief, goes to sea in order to gain perspective on her life. It’s a meditation on loss and longing and late-middle age that manages, thanks to Alther’s vivid prose and indomitable protagonist, to be as charming, amusing and enticing as her debut.
We meet Jessie Drake, an ER doctor in Burlington, Vermont, as she pulls up to the recycling center to dispose of all her sex aids. It’s a fraught, symbolic moment that started as a simple act of housekeeping. The week before, copying names and numbers into a new iPhone, Jessie was taken aback by how many of her contacts are dead. “She pictured herself dead and her son Anthony finding her antique VHS tape of ‘Lesbian Hospital’ while searching for her will. To spare him this trauma, she had decided to dispose of it herself.”