The Seal Wife By Kathryn Harrison

In Harrison's historical novel set in 1915, the protagonist, Bigelow Greene, a 26 year-old meteorologist from the Midwest, is hired by the Weather Bureau to set up an observation station in Anchorage, Alaska. As the town is only just developing as an outpost in the wilderness, Bigelow finds himself largely alone, trying to maintain his sanity in the harsh Arctic climate and struggling to supplement his meager government salary with odd jobs. He faces below-freezing temperatures and winter nights that begin at two in the afternoon. Most of all, though, he fights against the consuming loneliness reinforced by the bleakness around him in near Gothic fashion.

That is, of course, until Bigelow meets the Aleut woman. She never speaks to him, only allows him to follow her home one day to a frame house on the mud flats outside of Anchorage. They establish a routine in which he brings her a rabbit he has caught, she cooks it for him, they have sex and then she soaks in the bath while he talks to her about his life and his meteorological obsessions. She never says a word. One day, she disappears, and Bigelow is devastated. The Aleut woman becomes a new fixation for Bigelow, from which he seeks solace in drink and other, similarly silent women.

This is the most curious aspect of Bigelow's character: despite his loneliness, he is most attracted to women who are silent and repulsed by those who would dare open their mouths. One prostitute he visits recognizes this and gags herself with a towel to please him, saying, "I know you can't stand my talking. So, here." In the Aleut woman's absence, the only other female who appeals to Bigelow, at least for a time, is Miriam, the daughter of a local shop owner who has a stammer so severe that she can sing, but not talk, and communicates by writing on a notepad. "You like em' quiet, I guess," says Miriam's father, Getz. "Women that don't talk back. Can't say as I blame you." What is the reason for this preference? Is it, as Bigelow maintains, an attraction to the mystery of a silent woman, to the fact that "She is self-possessed. She possesses herself,"? Or is it because he is so consumed by his own obsession with charting the weather, an obsession that dominates every other chapter of Harrison's novel, that he cannot allow another's thoughts to enter his mind?

And of what significance is the weather? It's what brings Bigelow to Alaska despite the low pay: he craves the opportunity to prove his hypothesis that a great current of air sweeps in a circular fashion from the poles to the equator and back again, causing the air high over the poles to be warm, and the air over the equator cold. To test his theory, he designs and constructs an enormous kite to take temperature readings thousands of feet above the earth, thrilled with the idea that he is "recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people." His work is a success: unbeknownst to him, word of the kite has given him a reputation as a scientific innovator in Anchorage.

Yet, he can find no happiness without the Aleut woman. He may be able to interpret the weather, to give it a narrative and a history, but he cannot do the same for her. He knows nothing about her -- her family, her feelings; not even her name -- and his solipsism prevents him from knowing how to ask.