Lean Fall Stand

Starred review from July 5, 2021
McGregor’s stunning latest (after Reservoir 13) explores the aftermath of a traumatic accident. Robert Wright has spent a good deal of his professional life as a technician at Station K in Antarctica with a team of geographic researchers. During a storm, Robert is separated from his crew and suffers a near-fatal injury. McGregor beautifully captures Robert’s ensuing struggle for survival through passages of fragmented stream of consciousness. After Robert’s wife, Anna, is informed he had a stroke, she flies to meet him in Chile, where he has been hospitalized. But the Robert she encounters is a very different man from the one she last saw: among other injuries, his stroke has severely affected the language center of his brain. As the survival story becomes one of recuperation, Anna, an academic who studies the effects of global warming, must care for her disabled spouse, and McGregor portrays the tribulations of speech therapy with as much drama and depth as the depictions of men fighting for their lives on an Antarctic ice floe. Readers will be drawn into Robert and Anna’s heartbreaking struggle, all rendered in McGregor’s crystalline language. This gorgeous work leaves an indelible mark. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.

August 1, 2021
Robert "Doc" Wright, a veteran crew member on geological surveys for 30 years, travelled annually to Antarctica for months-long assignments, leaving his family in Cambridge, England. The current expedition, made with two less-experienced crewmates, ends in tragedy when the three men head out on the ice for an ill-advised photo shoot and are hit with a sudden storm. Robert's extensive experience would seem to place responsibility squarely on his shoulders, but during the chaos, he suffers a traumatic brain injury, later determined to be a stroke. A British novelist holding numerous prestigious international awards, McGregor (The Reservoir Tapes, 2018) artfully and subtly shifts registers in each of the three titular sections, moving from languorous and ominous to a staccato, adrenaline-fueled frenzy in "Lean," while "Fall" fills in the background of Robert's life and marriage. Finally, "Stand" is a tour de force of observational writing, masterfully capturing the struggle, frustration, and determination of Robert's healing process and recovery. Whether describing the majestic beauty of the natural world or the heartbreaking nuances of neurological deficit, McGregor's luminous prose brings the world brilliantly to life.

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Starred review from July 15, 2021
A storm, a stroke, a death--this Antarctic expedition leaves a traumatic aftermath. Robert "Doc" Wright, a 33-year veteran of Antarctic expeditions, couldn't have picked a worse time and place to have a stroke. Not only is he at a remote research station in Antarctica--"the nearest humans are about three hundred miles away. And they're Russian"--he and his two inexperienced teammates are outside, far from shelter, and physically separate from one another when the storm begins. Why? Because one of the researchers wants to take some pictures, and they've separated in order to get the right shots: "Without someone in the frame there was no way to capture the scale of this place." Confused, debilitated, embarrassed to call for help and admit that he's let such a dangerous situation arise, Doc finds himself ultimately unable to save the life of one of the young researchers for whom he's responsible. Another writer might have kept us in Antarctica, in the storm, sitting with these slender humans as they shiver and grimace against the enormity of nature. But not McGregor. In previous books like Reservoir 13 (2017) and The Reservoir Tapes(2018), McGregor has shown himself less interested in the immediate participants of tragedy than in the ripples such tragedies sew across the communities in which they transpire. Here, though McGregor relates much of the gripping event in question, he ultimately leaves Antarctica behind, turning his attention to Doc's wife, Anna, a climate change researcher who has long since tired of her husband's passion for the Antarctic and the annual absences that come with it. With Robert incapacitated by his stroke, Anna is suddenly thrust into the role of reluctant caregiver, helping him stand up, helping him dress himself, and ultimately trying to help him tell the story--to himself and to her--of what exactly happened down there, in Antarctica, in the blowing snow. Though its ending is only moderately successful (for some readers it may feel a bit too neat), this is nonetheless a quiet, beautiful novel that's at once deeply sad and wryly funny. Lyrical and terse, funny and tragic--a marvelous addition to the McGregor canon.

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