Away, by Amy Bloom. Very rough, very good.

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

Back in 2008 (!) I wrote about how interested I was in this novel, but how I was annoyed to find that it was written in the present tense. You know: "She walks down the street. She hears footsteps behind her." etc., etc.

It's a trend in novels lately and I really hate it. I mentioned that I was going to give Away a shot anyhow, and I realize that I never revisited the topic to talk about the book.

I'm admittedly a sucker for a pretty book cover, and this lovely cover belies the roughness of this novel. If you do not like violence or explicit and often demeaning sex, you'll probably skip it. I'm more about how the plot adds up, and what it says about the human spirit, and I loved the book.

It takes a young Jewish woman from the slaughter of her family in 1923 Russia, to a tenement on New York's Lower East Side, to life as the mistress of both a wealthy man and his gay son, to a trek across the continent in hope of getting back to Russia to find her missing daughter. The trek involves some acts of submission to people who can help her.

I found Bloom's ability to carry this procession of horrors into such a triumph of the will to love, to be kind of astounding.

Reaction to this book kind of baffles me. Check the reviews presented on Amazon: the Professional Book Folks -- NYTimes, Publisher's Weekly, et al. -- adore it. Readers are kind of lukewarm. There's a disconnect between the literati and readers.

If books are being published to the tastes of the literati and are flunking the reader test in masses, which might have some truth to it, that's an interesting "future of publishing" issue. But in this case, I'm more interested in the fact that Away seems to me like it would not exemplify that problem. Away has much to offer that I'd think readers would eat up. Lots of grim stories show people overcoming the ugly things they face, and many of those are well-loved by readers.

We start with new immigrant Lillian Leyb in New York a year after she survives the violent murders of her family. Her memories of that event come to us in a chilling dead-emotions tone.

Throughout the novel Lillian is chasing a rumor. Word reaches her that her little daughter might have survived, whisked away by neighbors. Further "maybes" take Lillian across the continent, in search of passage back to Siberia where she has heard her little girl was taken.

On the way, she joins temporary forces with a lot of characters. They have their own stories, and while she spends a few weeks or less with each and then goes her way, the author often takes a brief timeout from Lillian's story to give us a quick wrap-up about the entire rest of each secondary character's life.

It does take "omniscient narrator" to the extreme, telling us vastly more about the panorama of characters than Lillian could ever know. In one case, it even takes omniscience into an alternate history; as she slogs her way through the Alaska wilderness Lillian happens across three young children alone after the sudden death of their mother, and Bloom tells exactly how the children would have died, one by one, if Lillian hadn't walked up to their cabin.

All these expansions of the other characters' stories wowed me, because they make this slim novel much bigger, about not just one woman, but about America growing and building itself out of violence, endurance, chance, and stunningly raw material.

Without spoiling the plot ---- well it's difficult not to spoil the plot and still tell why I liked the book so much, but it balances harsh realism and successful endeavor.

Lillian seems to have kept her spirit and basic decency alive through everything. Is that realistic? Can you whore and kill, and still come out with your soul intact?

Lillian repents of practically nothing. With beautifully crafted psychological realism, Bloom shows us that Lillian's belief in God doesn't so much end as it deteriorates. A spark of some life force is still there, but so rudimentary that, if it survives at all, the shape it will take later in her life could have most any form:

...Lillian does not believe in anything like God. She's petitioned particular gods lately (the god of edible berries, the god of slow-moving streams), but she doesn't address or hope to be heard by the Creator of the Universe. Lillian believes in luck and hunger (and greed, which is really just the rich man's hunger--she doesn't even mind anymore; that people are ruled by their wants seems a reliable truth). She believes in fear as a motivator and she believes in curiosity (hers should have shrunk to nothing by now, but feeds on something Lillian cannot make sense of) and she believes in will.

Bloom isn't interested in making the reader comfortable with Lillian's actions. She writes Lillian, not as uncaring, or as so singleminded in her quest that she's indifferent to others' pain. She killed the pimp to save her friend's life, but resists taking his watch. She wouldn't "leave Seattle like a grave robber." But repentance is another matter. Lillian's need to find her daughter overwhelms all else.

The author takes the harder track through the simple facts of violence and its aftereffects, through choices as people perceive them, whether they perceive them accurately or not, and all against a backdrop of the feeling that time, like the kindness of strangers, must be exploited before it exploits you.

Would I call the ending a success story? Does a life driven by love always go where it's meant to? That aforementioned author omniscience tells us stories galore but never tells us any big cosmic whys.

As for the present tense, I still think that in a lot of novels it's getting used because it's trendy and sounds Terribly Deep and literary, but in the case of Away, it helps the reader understand Lillian's desperate, driven feeling.

I'd call this novel highly discussable! It's also short. It's also highly "accessible" which is literati talk for readable. I think it deserves more attention than it's had so far, but my taste may be weird.