Nicki Leone

Because it has been so hot here on the Carolina coast, I have been taking my dog for his walk in the evening, at dusk, rather than in the afternoon as we had been wont to do over the winter and spring. And although having a bouncing, energetic retriever pulling you along isn’t really the quietest way to travel, I have noticed the silence of dusk, and I have noticed the birds—the herons flying inland from the sound, the bluebirds and swallows, winging their way to their nests. The dog has flushed out doves, brown thrashers and an endless number of cardinals.

Perhaps the birds were always here and I just wasn’t looking, but in the evenings they are more easily noticed, as the background noise of human activity dies away. Most of the houses are lit with the flickering, uncertain light of televisions as we walk by—the dog, with his nose to the ground seeing nothing, and I, with my eyes peering into the trees, feeling as though I were seeing everything for the first time.

As the summer drifted on, we both ventured further and further into the woods, fields and marshes around our neighborhood. We’ve become quite unapologetic trespassers, strolling along neighbors’ piers, wandering through their backyards. And every day Ray watches the things on the ground, and I watch the birds.

I have Joyce Hinnefeld’s novel In Hovering Flight to thank for this new awareness. In one of those moments of serendipity that makes me wonder if the Universe is laughing, I was given a copy of the book the very day I decided, on a whim, to turn right at the end of my drive and walk the dog through the fields, instead of left, along the street lined with houses.

It is the kind of book designed to appeal to me—about poetry and painting and birds and artists. But I long ago decided that subject was not as important to me as style—interesting tidbits of information no longer excuses uncertain and mediocre writing. So while I was interested in learning, for example, the proper way to write in a field notebook if you are a bird watcher, or that John James Audubon may have invented the Cuvier’s Kinglet he describes in one of his many journals, it would not have been enough to capture my attention—even with the mention of Audubon, a person I am interested in for many reasons, one of which is actually hanging on the wall behind my head.

The style of the section called “field notebooks” however? Oh, that captured my attention immediately. It was quite as beautiful as the walks I took with my dog. Reading it makes me feel just like as if I’m standing on the small sandy rise down the street (soon to be a housing development but it was once a Civil War bunker, so it is a place that knows about battles) looking down towards the sound, enjoying the wind and resisting the tugging of the dog and just watching the sky for flying creatures:

Scarlet loved even the great blue herons, which became increasingly common in that protected area nea the Delaware as she grew into her teens, their harsh, ugly screeches piercing their mornings and evenings on the screened porch where they ate their meals. She would never forget the sight of one rising from the creek each morning, the spring when she was twelve, as she let the screen door slam behind her on her way to catch the bus to school. That rush of wind and then the silent, massive span above her head, darkening the sky—every time, it made her catch her breath. And she tried to find a way to describe its rising each day on the bus, playing with words in her head: “giant, silent feathered airplane,” blue-gray cloud with wings.” Tom, to her ongoing embarrassment, kept her spiral-bound notebooks from those years—notebooks full of phrases like these but rather lacking in homework assignments.

Herons make you reach for words, she told her father . . .

It was not lost on me, as I read that this section, patterned after the rigidly precise rules for keeping a scientific field journal, also soared in its language. It is painterly in its bright details, and by turns quietly profound and ruthlessly honest. Scientists and artists are both keenly trained observers, and not especially forgiving ones.

In Hovering Flight is a novel about mothers and daughters, poets and painters, and passion—the kind of passion that in an earlier era would have been named a “calling” in the religious sense. Addie Kavenaugh is an artist and poet who paints birds. Ted is her poet-biologist husband who teaches science with examples from Petrarch and John Clare. Scarlet is their daughter (not surprisingly also a poet), named for the one bird her mother never managed to capture on canvas. (If she had been a boy, she would have been named Tanager). And although the book opens with Addie’s death, it is Addie who dominates this book from first to last.  Or last to first, perhaps, because one of the first things the reader learns about Addie is that she has requested—no, insisted upon—a natural, and highly illegal, burial. One of the next things the reader learns is that Ted and Scarlet see it through.

So In Hovering Flight is really the story (or is it a painting?) of Addie Kavenaugh, from the day when she first discovered her passion for birds and for art (the two came simultaneously), through the day she discovered her passion for Tom, for Scarlet, and eventually for the kind of environmental activism that tends to scare people and end up in arson. She swam in controversy, sometimes thriving, sometimes drowning—and Tom and Scarlet learned to tell which was which by looking at her paintings. When a close friend’s son commits suicide, Addie begins drawing from dead birds instead of live ones, their carcasses littering her studio worktable. When she is diagnosed with cancer, she starts arranging the carcasses into poses, like Audubon, weirdly twisted into a semblance of life.

But although this is Addie’s book, Hinnefeld never makes the mistake of dismissing her other characters or reducing the story to an account of one woman’s obsessions. Addie did not spring, like Athena, fully formed and ready to wreak havoc upon all those who came in contact with her. Tom, Scarlet, Addie’s best friends Cora and Lou, their own children—each has their place in Addie’s life as she has had in theirs and the author recognizes this fact. Even the briefest interactions and conversations receive the full and careful treatment Hinnefeld has brought to painting her portrait of Addie. Whether you are an artist or a scientist, you understand that no bird lives in a blank canvas. It’s all about the setting. Hinnefeld takes great care to place Addie in her setting.

The end result is one of those stories where even the small ordinary events and crises of our lives feel extraordinary; people meet, fall in love, have children, battle cancer, drift apart or back together—it is the stuff of a hundred thousand novels on a hundred thousand bookshelves. But because Hinnefeld’s language is so precisely chosen, so sharply observant, and so fiercely, unflinchingly honest, the smallest exchanges between Addie and her family, her friends, carry the weight of profundity. The smallest events feel momentous, portentious. I’m aware that “fierce” has not been the word commonly used to describe this novel—I’ve actually gone to great lengths to avoid words like “ethereal,” “elegant,” and, god help us, “lyrical.” But “fierce” it is.

There is great courage in this story, not simply in its subject of a woman committed to living out her ideals and pursuing her artistic vision, even in the face of great cost and hardship, but also in the writing. Although the writing styles are nothing alike, the emotional honesty of the story reminds me irresistably of Virginia Woolf, if Woolf had decided to pay as close attention to our external lives as she did to our internal ones. It’s possible that I would have loved the book for the simple fact that it has made my evening walks with the dog more interesting.  But In Hovering Flight has done much more than inspire me to keep my own “field journal” and bird count. Now I see more of the world, and that is what makes the novel a success. 

Books mentioned in this column:
In Hovering Flight (Unbridled Books; $24.95)


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying number of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.