About Grace

Anthony Doerr was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Bowdoin College in Maine, receiving a degree in history, and earned a Master of Fine Arts from Bowling Green State University. Doerr has written two short story collections, including The Shell Collector (2002) and Memory Wall (2010), and three novels, including About Grace (2004); All the Light We Cannot See (2014), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; and Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021). In addition, he has released a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome (2008). Many of Doerr’s stories are set in Africa and New Zealand, both places he has lived and worked. The locations in About Grace include Doerr’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and his current residence in Boise, Idaho, among other locations.

Doerr writes with an almost poetic prose that often uses nature to explore the complexities of human existence. In About Grace, he uses the complexity of water to express such things as the flow of time and the way that time seems to allow a certain repetition as it moves through cycles. The main character, Winkler, often studies water and snow in an attempt to understand his own place in the world. Each time Winkler faces a devastating setback, Doerr places him in a battle with nature: a near drowning, a walk through the late summer heat, or a fight against extreme cold. Nature is both a source of fascination for Winkler and an antagonist of the novel given that nature both gives Winkler insight into the future and threatens to take the lives of his daughter and surrogate daughter.

Doerr’s writing style in this novel is marked by not only his penchant for poetic prose but also his use of the limited third-person point of view. The entire novel is seen through Winkler’s eyes; therefore, only through his perception of the world and the people who move in and out of his life is the reader allowed to see the novel’s action. The novel is told primarily in narrative form with few fully drawn scenes. Therefore, the characters are developed only in the way that Winkler perceives them. He lives a somewhat isolated life and has little social interaction, and this inexperience limits his comprehension of the actions and motivations of others. While Winkler logically comprehends what’s happening around him, he often misses small cues that might help him understand a person’s emotional reaction to an event, causing him to misrepresent or underrepresent the motivation of another character. At times, this can create a misunderstanding of someone’s actions that must be corrected only through words or actions provided by other characters in the novel. While this causes some characters to appear uncaring or flat at times, it only serves to further explore Winkler’s view of the world, just as his fascination with nature does.