In October, I sat inside James Turrell’s installation Hind Sight for the first time. This is what it was like: I followed a railing along a winding pathway before arriving at a chair, where I sat. I then stared across the room at something imperceptible: something made out of light, something not designed to be perceived by human eyes under normal light. I left the room with a greater understanding of friends and family who have had genuinely religious experiences. In Hind Sight, there was the sense of perceiving something utterly ineffable and yet utterly present.

I’m a lapsed Episcopalian turned agnostic, which is as good a way as any to segue into talking about Tara Isabella Burton’s novel Here in Avalon. Across her three novels, Burton seems to be one of the handful of contemporary writers reckoning with questions of faith and belief in their fiction, even in a context where – as is the case here – it’s not a book ostensibly about faith at all. Faith suffuses this novel, even as it’s about a much more secular form of transcendence. Or maybe there’s no difference between secular and religious forms of transcendence; maybe that’s the very point Burton is trying to make here.

At the heart of this novel are two sisters, Cecilia and Rose. Both were raised by their mother in the last days of a more bohemian era in New York City, and the two have responded to that in wildly different ways. Cecilia pursues art and love and adventure in countless ways; Rose opts for a more traditional life, working in tech and acquiring a fiance, a fellow tech worker named Caleb. It’s when Cecilia returns to New York that this novel’s storyline begins. 

Burton uses the third person to bring the reader inside of Rose’s head, and to give a sense of how she may be convincing herself to adopt a certain worldview:

It had been a long time since Rose had stayed out until four in the morning. She liked it that way. She always felt a little sorry for the people who hit thirty-five or forty or sixty and still hadn’t worked out what they wanted to be when they grew up; the kind of people who wandered from bar to bar and party to party, telling frenetic stories that were supposed to be funny, and always needed you to cover their tab, thinking the point of their life was six months in front of them instead of twenty years behind.

Gradually, Cecilia becomes obsessed with finding a floating cabaret called the Avalon, which seems to offer a world of pure aesthetic pleasure and a sense of community, one that’s radically different from the far more corporatized world in which Rose lives. And then Cecila vanishes; it’s not terribly spoilery to say that Rose eventually sets out to find her sister, or that Cecilia’s ex Paul also becomes involved in that search.

Ever since I read Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard at a formative age, I’ve been drawn to novels where there’s a magical undercurrent to New York City. (See also: Victor LaValle’s The Changeling.) Here in Avalon certainly has that quality to it, with a series of clues leading various characters to various landmarks around the city. Combine that with nods to a couple of great New York bars and you have a story that works on both an archetypal level and a local one.

But lived-in details can only get you so far, and the big ideas in Burton’s novel aren’t specific to New York City, though they do feel specific to the contemporary condition. Fundamentally, this is a novel about the challenges of going against the grain of a materialistic, success-driven culture, a drive most embodied by Rose’s fiance Caleb, who manages to be awful without ever becoming cartoonishly so. It’s not surprising that religion and faith play a role here, given Burton’s extensive writing about both subjects. Sometimes that occurs as background details: one character turns out to have been a former Episcopal priest, and at one point early on, Cecilia takes a job as the organist at an Anglo-Catholic church.

While the allure of the Avalon is presented in artistic and secular terms, there’s also a more overt role for faith in one subplot: that which relates to Paul’s offbeat devotion to Cecilia. There’s something of Graham Greene in this — specifically, The End of the Affair. And it’s a  measure of Burton’s humanism that she takes that impulse seriously without making this novel a tract in favor of or in denial of a particular approach to religion.

Occasionally, Burton provides glimpses of what’s to come, flashes of Rose at some point after the events of this novel take place. There’s not a lot of detail provided here; the reader neither has the sense that this all ends in tears or that a happy ending awaits. And when the end of Here in Avalon comes, it ultimately comes in a more ambiguous form, one that offers the possibility of transcendence even with the knowledge that it’s fleeting. But then again, isn’t that always the case?

***

Here In Avalon
by Tara Isabella Burton
Simon & Schuster; 320 p.

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