Beginning Middle End

A dialogue opens the novel: A grandmother says she fears losing her mind; a daughter asks if her mother will finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The narrator, a writer and recently divorced mother, pulls her twelve-year-old daughter out of school in New York and sets off on an open-ended trip across Europe. After finishing a difficult book, completing a sound-recording project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and enduring a slow divorce, the narrator feels unmoored, unable to write or begin anything new. With her book coming out in translation, she accepts every invitation for readings and lectures. She and her daughter spend April and May moving through cities including Berlin, Prague, Istanbul, and Barcelona, living out of two suitcases. The daughter, who lost her stepbrother when the divorce severed the only family structure she knew, obsessively buys postcards but refuses to send them.

When June arrives, they fly to Catania, Sicily, the hometown of the narrator's maternal grandmother, Nanna, who emigrated from the island nearly a century ago and never returned. They move into the apartment of a pianist the narrator met in New York after her divorce. He is away on tour, but the two have maintained a long-distance romantic connection. In the apartment, the narrator places a mosaic tile depicting the Greek sea god Proteus on a desk. The mosaic is a family heirloom: Nanna took it from archaeological ruins at the Villa Romana del Casale, a lavish ancient Roman estate near the town of Philosophiana, where she worked as a day laborer on excavations in the 1920s. Nanna had disguised herself as a man to get hired, secretly pocketed the Proteus fragment, was later exposed, humiliated, and fired. The narrator's mother, Manuela, who lives in a small coastal town in Baja California called La Fortuna, gave her the mosaic before the trip, insisting it would bring good luck.

In Catania, mother and daughter form new routines. They visit the fish market, where the narrator buys a swordfish head, and explore the city, passing a park where migrants in tents await asylum processing. The narrator tells her daughter the myth of Proteus, the shape-shifting god who could see the future and past but resisted revealing his knowledge, transforming into anything to escape capture: "a swordfish, a camera, a rainstorm, a jellyfish, a donkey, a toothbrush, fire, a boat, a book" (30). The daughter insists they should return the stolen mosaic to its original site, a disagreement that recurs throughout their stay. At bedtime, the daughter asks the narrator to read from Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, a gift from Manuela. She rereads only the first chapter, over and over, never progressing beyond it.

The narrator struggles to write, working on notes for a book tentatively called Maternity Leave about a daughter who asks her aging mother to translate her novel as a strategy to ward off dementia. She worries about the blurring of her fiction and her daughter's memories, as the girl has begun confusing events from the narrator's novels with her own life. Meanwhile, Manuela sends translations of Latin classics, a practice the narrator encouraged to help keep her mother's mind sharp. Troubling signs emerge: Manuela forgets appointments, misplaces belongings, and struggles with simple tasks. She also belongs to an eco-radical group convinced the U.S. government plans to build a border canal to replace the border wall.

Each night, the narrator reads aloud from the pianist's Loeb Classical Library, a bilingual series of Greek and Roman texts. They work through Seneca's Trojan Women, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and passages from the Odyssey, where they find the most significant account of Proteus: The Greek hero Menelaus captures the god, endures his violent transformations, and learns everything he wants to know, but afterward wishes only to forget. The daughter grows absorbed by Pliny the Elder's Natural History, a vast Roman encyclopedia, after her grandmother challenges her to identify the source of a translated passage.

When the pianist returns in early July, the three attempt to live together. He is charming but controlling, dismissive of the daughter, and increasingly possessive. He refuses to lend his car for the trip to the villa. At the beach, the daughter is stung by a jellyfish on the forehead while the pianist sits passively on his towel. His behavior escalates: He leaves bruises on the narrator during sex, and one night, drunk, pins her against the refrigerator. The narrator decides they must leave.

She searches for a way out of the city, but buses are booked, trains are on strike, and fires have closed the airport. Before dawn, while the pianist sleeps, the narrator takes his driver's license from his wallet. She and her daughter fill a white suitcase with volumes from his shelves, leave the apartment keys and a cryptic note, and slip out.

They rent a car and drive west across the island's interior on small roads, avoiding highways that trigger the narrator's severe anxiety. The sky is orange with wildfire smoke. They arrive at the Villa Casale and join a tour led by Anna, an art-history student, who explains that the mosaics were crafted by North African artisans using materials from what is now Tunisia. The narrator and daughter search for the room from which Nanna took the Proteus fragment but cannot identify it. The daughter argues they should not leave the mosaic here: Since the stones originated in Carthage, returning them to Sicily would not truly restore them. She proposes they must return the mosaic to where the stones originated, in the past. On the back of the tile, they discover words in handwriting that may be Manuela's or Nanna's: "The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place" (218).

They continue to Philosophiana, walking the final mile when the road becomes impassable. A family of donkeys wearing bells joins them on the path. At the sunken ruins, they find no trace of Nanna's house but play an imaginative game of being tombarole, tomb raiders, calling out the metamorphoses of Proteus. They unearth a real toothbrush from the dirt, and the daughter is elated.

In Part 3, the narrative voice shifts. The daughter writes secretly on her mother's computer in Poscello, a small coastal town on the island's western shore, where they have taken shelter with Vito, Manuela's elderly friend. Fire glows behind a nearby mountain. Vito and a man the daughter calls the telescope man are preparing a small boat in case military rescue vessels do not arrive. The daughter reveals she has been reading her mother's unfinished manuscript and has organized its notes using subheadings from Pliny's table of contents. She discloses how she obtained her Polaroid camera weeks earlier: She took the swordfish head to refugee children in a Catania park, borrowed money, won a chess tournament against older men, and used the winnings to buy the camera.

The daughter explains her private theory: Each of Proteus's metamorphoses has appeared in sequence during their journey. The swordfish, the camera, the rainstorm, the jellyfish, the donkeys, the toothbrush, the fire, and now the boat. The final metamorphosis, the book, is the text she is composing. She reveals she has been strategically distracting her mother with questions about time travel and Proteus, having noticed that intellectual engagement calms her mother's anxiety. She addresses the entire narrative to Manuela, instructing her grandmother to translate it so she will not lose her memory. She asks her mother to play a divination game with Pliny's table of contents, choosing a phrase with her eyes closed to serve as the book's title. Vito calls from outside: The boat is ready. The daughter closes by imagining their arrival in Tunisia, the return of Proteus's stones to the mountain where they originated, and her grandmother sitting at her kitchen window as the world remembers itself. She declares the book has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

A final section presents the daughter's unsent postcards, archival photographs of excavations near Philosophiana, and 32 Polaroid images documenting the journey from Catania to Poscello, ending with the mother standing by the window and the telescope man looking at the sky.