LUNA, PHOENIX, QUEEN

A shelter dog, a secret novel, and a family in extremis.

At the opening of this novel by the author of The Invisible Bridge (2010) and The Flight Portfolio (2019), Barr Pennington, a novelist and writing professor at an Iowa-like university, is preparing to adopt a dog. “I never really thought of you as a dog person,” says Evie, his skeptical research assistant. She’s not wrong, but Barr is a man in free fall: His wife, Dava, once a brilliant professor of literature, is now in a care facility with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and in her study he’s discovered a novel she’d written on yellow legal pads and shown to no one; it transparently fictionalizes a long-running love affair with another faculty member, Svetlana White. Barr transcribes the pages onto his computer, and then, “almost unconsciously, he began to do something beyond editing, something that felt more like writing.” Thus he becomes the acclaimed and successful author of The Refuge, a man who must convince himself that he’s not a fraud. “A dog could make you feel that your life had some worth after all, that you hadn’t forfeited your claim to all affection in this world,” he thinks. From this dramatic beginning, Orringer constructs a soulful novel that works variations on themes of love, loss, and legacy across eight linked sections that shift in time and point of view. Along the way readers come to intimately know Barr, Dava, and Svetlana; Barr and Dava’s rivalrous sons and Svetlana’s daughter (who, as a teen, identifies as a deer trapped in a human body); Evie and her deaf brother. Passing inscrutably in and out of the narrative is Luna, rechristened Phoenix, a one-eared dog who survived a house fire; she is both a mirror for the characters and a cipher.

Heart-stoppingly good.