Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking

Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut novel spans two isles, Manhattan and the fictional Crab Island, off the coast of Maine, where Miranda Donnal lives with Peter, her widowed, eccentric father. Peter moved the New York–based family to this water-locked haven when Miranda was three, hoping to complete his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After her mother dies in a mysterious boating accident, Miranda and her father lead an increasingly solitary life.

Until, that is, Miranda graduates from high school and goes to New York City to work at the library of the classical-studies institute that Peter founded years ago. She moves in with two of his old friends, Walter and Robert, a bickering gay couple, and slowly begins to uncover her father’s buried past. She also experiences her own twinges of first love—first with a sweet guy named Nate; then, more searingly, with a Dominican woman, Ana, to whom she feels an instant and ineluctable pull.

At one point, Miranda admits that she is “too quiet and serious,” a statement that might apply to the novel as a whole. Sweeney’s narrative marks itself as “literary” in all the right ways, with its lovely descriptive passages and subtlety. Yet its limitations are evident, too—starting with that unwieldy, self-conscious title and the author’s willingness to go only so far in plumbing her characters’ psyches and sexual ambivalence. Why bother exploring desire unless you take it all the way? In the end, this solidly written novel, too earnest for its own good, is dampened by restraint.

Sweeney reads Aug 2 at Barnes & Noble Park Slope and Aug 8 at Bluestockings.