About Grace is about David Winkler, a man crippled and made fearful by the accuracy of his dreamed premonitions — a man who foresees future events and who is then constrained to watch them unfold. He dreams of a man killed in an accident and then witnesses that accident. He dreams of meeting his future wife and then encounters her exactly as foretold. And then he dreams of the death by drowning of their one-year-old daughter, Grace — a death in which David Winkler himself plays a large part.
In an effort to forestall this, Winkler decides to leave the only two people he loves, escape to the Caribbean, and live alone there for the next 25 years. After which, increasingly curious, and finally believing himself to be forgiven and redeemed, he returns to America and sets about discovering whether or not his daughter has lived or died.
There is a long and well-worn tradition of the ordinary man turned outsider in American fiction and film (and more recently of the alien outsider turned ordinary); of men at odds with the worlds they inhabit; men — solitary wanderers — with needs and ambitions contrary to those of the societies in which they were nurtured, and in which they believed they would live out their preordained lives; and men who, upon cutting themselves adrift, can then no longer contend with the loss and estrangement which grip them, and which ultimately either destroy them at home or force them to flee and then destroy them a long way from home.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in