The Brooklyn Rail

Blowin’ in the Wind

What’s interesting about Hurricane Season is that its prose comes with a built-in metaphor—the torturous swirl of narration is, of course, reminiscent of a hurricane. But this to-hand description slightly obscures the careful mechanisms at play in the writing, the way that pebbles of thought fall and in their falling activate other memories that carom off at odd angles, a sort of landslide of association. Hence, we witness Norma’s investigation of her body, her subsequent estrangement and from it, and her feverish misinterpretation of a breeze, which draws her back, miraculously, into a childhood memory of snow.