appThen, Again,app the debut novel by Fort Wayneapps Jaclyn Youhana Garver, is a book full of big ideas and small, telling moments, perhaps best encapsulated here:
appThatapps what itapps like, the days after you graduate from high school. Everything is possible, simultaneously. Every idea is a good idea, even if itapps a terrible one. You donappt even recognize it as apphopeapp app itapps just the way things are. Itapps only life, and the idea that it could be fleeting is foreign, hieroglyphics in the dark corner of a cave you canappt even see, let alone translate.app
The woman in whose head these thoughts reside is Asha Khoury, whose life we watch unfold across three distinct time periods: her adolescence in the late 1990s, the year following college (2006) and the present day (2017).
That last date is significant, Garver says, because itapps the year in which she spent three months writing her first draft of appThen, Again.app (Full disclosure, Garver is a Journal Gazette alum; she was a reporter in the features department from 2008-13).
It took seven years and appmany revisions,app she says, for that initial draft to be crafted into the novel that debuted on Tuesday. Garverapps previous publications include a book of poetry, appThe Men I Never:,app and the story appThe Butterfly Collectorapp in the collection appThe World Belongs to Us.app
Garverapps narrative deftly employs the technique of time-hopping. We see in alternating chapters how decisions regarding Ashaapps first teenage love, Jason, inform her thoughts and actions regarding her husband, Charlie. Most importantly in the context of the storyline, those thoughts inform Ashaapps decisions regarding the coma that has subsumed Charlie by 2017.
appI once read somewhere that who we are in eighth grade is basically the same person we are as adults,app Asha tells us at the start of the story. appI think about that a lot.app
As do we while we follow Asha, accompanied by her always-reliable BFF Bridget, through the intersecting timelines of her life. The story takes place in and primarily around the outskirts of Cincinnati, where Garver spent her formative years.
Implied by the title, one of the themes appThen, Againapp explores is whether first love endures. Itapps Charlie who tells Asha: appIt doesnappt matter if millions of people on the planet fall in love every day app each falling is extraordinary. Itapps its own tiny macrocosm with its own life forms and pulse.app (See app big idea/small, telling moment.) But his words ring as true for the Asha/ Jason relationship as they do for the Asha/Charlie marriage.
While the conclusion of appThen, Againapp is not definitive, Garver has sprinkled enough clues, right up until the final page, to allow readers to paint their own mental picture of how Asha carries on once we close the book for the final time. By that point, youappll be invested enough in this intriguing woman to want to envision that future for yourself.
Over lunch, Garver shares that she did not have a specific ending in mind as she wrote. Nor did she employ any sort of timeline/outline to keep track of the progression of Ashaapps life as the author jumped around among her main characterapps various stages. She likens the process to driving at night and simply appfollowing the headlights.app
As Asha herself tells us: appTime is linear, but sometimes we circle back again, donappt we?app
Garver also says she maintains a deep connection to her characters that endures even as she leaves them on the printed page. For the novel sheapps currently writing, Garver says she recently bought a gift for one of the characters because she knew the bloodstone would be something that character would appreciate.
In appThen, Again,app no detail app the letter, the locket, Jasonapps knuckle-cracking app is insignificant, and no words are wasted. Moments of deep introspection occur alongside moments of high comedy, and it all works app not because it is true to life, but because it is life.
Keith Elchert is copy editor of appapps editorial pages.
