Book review: February

IT'S HARD to give movement to a story about stasis. Grief, as all those immersed in it are aware, causes a numbness, an arrest – a "formal feeling", as Emily Dickinson put it. To tell it straight is to tell of a person's repeated, futile reaching for the absent loved one, the insistent return to the original moment of loss. Combating this circularity is the narrative challenge the accomplished Canadian writer Lisa Moore faces in her new novel. Moore has canvassed the melancholy territory of grief before, in her first novel, Alligator, but here it's the heart of her concern.

The novel's heroine is Helen O'Mara, a tough, pragmatic Newfoundlander whose husband, Cal, perished in the 1982 sinking of an oil rig. A mother of three at the time of his death, Helen discovered soon afterward that she was pregnant. Stolidly raising their four children alone, she has never got over the shock of losing her husband.

The novel's narrative present begins in November 2008. Helen's children are all grown up and her eldest son, John, is almost constantly on the road. Then suddenly he must reassess his life. He calls her from Singapore to announce that he's to become a father: a woman with whom he had a brief affair has phoned to say she's six months pregnant. Moore interweaves John's crisis and the questions it raises about his own life with descriptions of Helen's reluctant renovation of her house, a project her sister has persuaded her to undertake. The carpenter, a hardworking man named Barry, catches Helen's – and the reader's – attention. But for Helen and John the main preoccupation is still the past.

Moore has great strengths as a writer, chiefly in her powers of description. She gives us the cold, steep streets of St John's in its many wintry incarnations, and well-observed scenes of family life. But there are difficulties – in part with the novel's pacing and in part with Cal himself. Moore is adept at conveying the emptiness that followed the accident, but not what filled it. And Cal remains hard to grasp – the flashbacks contain few traces of his conversation, so we don't even know how he sounded. Moore is better at describing his physical than his emotional presence, which makes Helen's protracted grief hard to share.

By 2008, however, the metaphors of renewal are finally at hand. Helen has been urged to take a yoga class, so in a slyly comic scene we see her trying to achieve gratitude and balance. Earlier, learning to drive, she is told by her instructor, "Helen, we have to go forward." She has an adventure in Greece with her widowed sister. And then there's her house – and the man who is reshaping it for her. When Helen tells Barry, "It looks pretty good," and he laconically agrees, we feel, at last, a woman returning from the long exile of her grief.