The Snow Child

“Was that why they had come north—to build a life? Or did fear drive her? Fear of the gray, not just in the strands of her hair and her wilting cheeks, but the gray that ran deeper, to the bone, so that she thought she might turn into a fine dust and simply sift away in the wind.”

Mabel questions her motive for relocating to the Alaskan wilderness. She acknowledges that she had hoped to find a world without the distracting noises of families to avoid thinking about her stillborn child. But the strategy is not working. Here she indicates how she feels like she is disappearing, like her entire identity is hissing away in the gray vastness of the territory.

“‘She’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think? She’s beautiful.’”

In Mabel’s too-enthusiastic reaction to the snow child she and Jack built, her emotional response takes a dramatic turn away from reality and into fairy-tale fantasy. The pile of snow is already anthropomorphized—and “it” becomes a “she.” Indeed, in repeating the word “beautiful,” which by itself seems out of place when used to describe a pile of snow, Mabel reveals how she is trying to convince not only Jack but also herself of the lifeless snow sculpture’s beauty.

“But it was something about the child, too. Without her, he never would have seen the moose. She led him here and alerted him when, like a clod, he had passed by the animal. She moved through the forest with the grace of a wild creature.”

Early on Jack provides a critical counterargument to Mabel’s unquestioning embrace of the mysterious child as a creation of their love. But when Jack gets lost and in turn relies on that mysterious child to lead him to the bull moose, which provides him and Mabel with sustenance to survive the winter, even he is coaxed to consider that maybe this mysterious girl is something extraordinary, even magical. This passage summarizes the attitude of Part 1, where the girl is deliberately suspended between fantasy and reality.

“I don’t mean to speak out of turn, Mabel, but this isn’t an easy place to get along. The winters are long, and sometimes it starts to get to you. Around here, they call it cabin fever.”

Esther says what readers are thinking: Driven by inconsolable grief, compelled by a day-to-day routine of insuperable loneliness, Mabel has fashioned her own consolation, the child she was denied. Here Esther provides a possible explanation for the snow child. As Mabel’s new friend, she puts the suggestion of Mabel’s madness into neighborly context, suggesting that the long Alaskan winters can drive the mind to conjure alternative realities that help make the harsh environment bearable.

“The truth awed her. Not only was the child a miracle, but she was their creation.”

The statement—which Mabel packages as truth—is remarkably simple yet painfully revealing. Mabel and Jack have created a life, a kind of reboot for their loss years earlier. For Mabel, the interpretation of the mysterious child is all too simple: the only explanation is magic. Reeling from her catastrophic childbirth experience, shutting down honest confrontation with her pain, Mabel accepts as truth what we recognize is preposterous: grief cannot create a child. That Mabel accepts that logic proves the depth of her pain.

“But the girl was already out the door. She did not seem angry or frightened. As her feet hit the snow, she turned back to Mabel and Jack. Thank you, she said, her voice a quiet bell on Mabel’s ear. And then she slipped away into the night with her long blond hair trailing down her back.”

Here Faina speaks for the first time. Or does she? Before this moment she has been quiet, giving her already mysterious presence an ethereal unreality. The lack of quotation marks around her dialogue only heightens that mystique, leaving readers to wonder whether she truly spoke at all.

“Mabel was often at the window, but it wasn’t with the melancholy weariness of the previous winter. Now she watched with excitement and hope that the little girl in the fur hat and leather moccasins would appear from the woods.”

Mabel begins the narrative at the window—then she is despondent, isolated, depressed. She stares out into the wilderness and sees only unending (and unendurable) emptiness. But here, we see the mysterious girl and her comings and goings have given Mabel new life. She now sits at the window in giddy expectation. But this hope is problematic. Mabel still believes the child is some sort of magic creature—we know she still has much to learn.

“I will change the ending and have everyone live happily ever after. We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?”

The exchange of letters between Mabel and her sister provides insight into Mabel’s evolution as a character. She first writes to Ada to secure a copy of the Russian fairy tale she believes she and Jack are now living in. Her sister cautions Mabel that the fairy tale ends tragically for the old couple. Here Ada, for the first time in the narrative, suggests that maybe real life inspires joy, that we create our own happily-ever-afters. But Mabel is not ready to hear this.

“It completely baffles me, Jack. She’s real. You’ve seen her with your own eyes, sat with her at this very table. And yet never once have you acknowledged it to the Bensons.”

Here we see the division that Faina’s presence initially creates between Jack and Mabel. Mabel believes the child is a powerful fantasy and she wants her husband to validate her logic—yes, the girl is a magic creature, but yes, she is real as well. Jack naturally hesitates—by this time, he has seen the corpse of Faina’s father and her hut in the woods. He’s reluctant to acknowledge only half of his wife’s logic and destroy the joy she finds in her fairy creature.

“Once Mabel was certain she had caught a fairy. When she was eight years old, she built a trap box out of twigs and hung it in the oak tree in their backyard. In the middle of the night she spied it out her bedroom window rocking back and forth in the moonlight, and when she opened the window she could hear the high-pitched twittering, just how she imagined a trapped fairy would sound.”

Here we are given insight into Mabel’s hunger for fantasy. The “fairy” she trapped turns out to be a hapless songbird that ventured into the trap. But we see how convinced Mabel was that she had at last caught a fairy. This trapping is innocent, even amusing. She is, after all, a child. But her determination nearly 40 years later that Faina is a fairy she has caught reminds us of how traumatized Mabel was by the death of her child, how desperately she needs the simple escape of fantasy. This memory also foreshadows Faina’s problematic abandonment of her family in the novel’s closing chapters. Like the trapped songbird, Faina must also be set free.

“The sketch was too small, and Mabel saw it would be impossible to capture every groove and live. She wished for a magnifying glass and flipped to a new page.”

Mabel’s clumsy efforts to sketch a snowflake kickstart her journey to embrace the complex beauty of nature’s simplest elements, which she has too easily dismissed as ugly and harsh. An accomplished sketch artist such as Mabel should have no problem capturing the apparently simply figure, but she is frustrated because she cannot capture its surprisingly intricate beauty.

“Jack did not fall asleep right after dinner but helped clear the table. The first time he stepped in and began to wash the dishes, she had pretended to swoon, the back of her hand to her brow, peering through half-closed lids until he kissed her smile They laughed and danced and made love.”

Under Faina’s tonic influence, Jack and Mabel rediscover their love. When the narrative begins, the two are far apart, each left to their own grief. The playful, rambunctious energy here suggests a kind of magic that does not need pixie dust: the tectonic immediacy of sexuality.

“Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here. He could see across the entire river valley, could almost make out their homestead far below.”

Jack, who struggles to establish their home against the formidable challenge of his adopted state, notices its beauty. Alaska is no fairy-tale wonderland. Its oppressive harshness, sheer size, brutal weather, intractable wilderness, and dangerous wildlife suggest that humanity is small, useless, and vulnerable within such a landscape. Mabel and Jack later come to appreciate the wilderness’s grandeur as a manifestation of the wonders in the world.

“She crawled between the trees, her knees and palms scraped. When she found nothing, she stood and felt a painful tingling in her breasts and suddenly milk trickled down her front, wet her nightgown, dribbled onto her belly, spilled uselessly to the ground. I cannot survive this grief, she had thought.”

At last, Mabel remembers what she came to Alaska to forget: the experience of the stillbirth. She recalls lactating involuntarily when she visited her child’s freshly dig grave. This harrowing moment gives insight into the trauma itself—we understand her reticence to recall the experience, as her admission that she still did not know the child’s name could make Mabel appear unsympathetic. Here we learn the pain of motherhood denied.

“She was no longer a lost soul—she was right there beside him, the same dirt on her hands, the same thoughts on her mind.”

Mabel is the daughter of privilege. She grew up in a world of books and museums, gardens and recitals. She has always felt wonderfully apart, easily coaxed into a world of imaginative excess far from the realities of the working class. Here, with Jack on the mend from his broken back, Mabel feels for the first time a deep connection to the farm, to her husband, and to their commitment to begin a new life in Alaska. She feels useful and engaged; she no longer has time to get lost in the pain of her emotional trauma. Here the earth itself is offered as consolation, a reminder that the narrative will ultimately endorse this world, not some fantasy world, as blessing enough.

“How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable.”

Mabel must accept that we are not given to understanding nature. There is perhaps no better summary of Mabel’s acceptance than this observation she makes about a snowflake. She reveals how she is beginning to appreciate nature’s mysteries, how explanation and accountability do not govern the natural world. Mabel later applies that logic to her own stillborn. She spent so much emotional excess trying to find logic in her loss that she closed herself off from the stunning mysteries of love, family, and friendship.

“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”

Ada’s letter commences the narrative’s argument that real magic exists in the day to day. Ada has cautioned Mabel that her embrace of fairy tales ignores the obvious: the real world is no fairy tale. There are no snow maidens, no pixie-dusted fairy-children teasing and playing in the woods. Perhaps, Ada advises, Mabel should look toward rather than away from the real world. Maybe the magic is not the fairy in the garden but the garden itself.

“As they neared the corner, where the small channel rejoined the main river, they slowed to a stop and the three of them stood arm in arm, Jack and Mabel gasping for breath. The moon lit up the entire valley, gleaming off the river ice and glowing on the white mountains.”

This is the narrative’s most captivating scene, the closest it comes to a fairy tale. This fleeting snapshot in the middle of winter epitomizes the fragility of love and kinship. The three create a fairy-tale moment—mother, father, and child together under the gorgeous glow of a magical moon. But the moment cannot last. The three are on ice skates (and none of them can actually skate), thus suggesting the vulnerability of this moment of joy in a forbidding world.

“So how was it that this winter was different, that everywhere he went the forest snow was riddled with her tracks and he couldn’t be free of her?”

This is exactly the question everyone who has ever fallen in love has asked. The narrative shifts focus to the emerging love between Garrett and Faina. Garrett, the loner, the socially awkward man-child who prefers the wilderness, cannot shake thoughts of the girl he saw in the woods. We are reminded of the impact of love, how it upends the everyday and creates an entirely new perception of time and place. Without the hokey trappings of a fairy tale, two young people discover the magic of love.

“He tried to remember the shape of her lips. He wondered what it would be like to touch them. And more than anything, he wanted to remember her scent, vague and so familiar.”

The young love typical of the fairy tale is not operating here. Garrett, influenced by his deep attachment to nature, sees his attraction for Faina in terms of terms of touch, sight, smell. In particular, the word “scent” suggests hunting imagery. We see clearly that Faina is no fairy-tale princess. She is a powerful woman, a commanding presence who is undeniably real.

“A wave of guilt shuddered through him, that somehow what they were doing was wrong, but it was too late. There, along her delicate rib cage…there, against her beating heart…there, he was lost.”

The intimacy between Faina and Garrett violates conventional morality. But their love is the most striking example of how the real world can touch the profoundly spiritual. Love here is not fairy-tale froth but raw, immediate, surging, and irresistible. This physical act alone creates the conception that provides the novel its most joyous moment.

“So now an infant, or at least the potential of an infant, was unexpectedly placed before Mabel, and she was tempted to accept it as a gift. Perhaps it was fate. Everything had led to this moment when at last her wish was granted.”

This quote reveals the depth of Mabel’s displaced maternal love. She is not sure how to respond to Faina’s unexpected pregnancy. She is bothered by its violation of morality, but she also wants to embrace it as a gift. Here we touch at last the power of maternal love, the instinct Mabel has denied for nearly three decades, the love she wants to give to a child.

“She had been magic in their lives, coming and going with the seasons, bringing treasures from the wilderness in her small hands. That child was gone, and Jack found himself mourning her.”

Nature teaches us all that life is fundamentally, unerringly, undeniably about change. Jack and Mabel achieve this understanding when they both accept that inevitability without surrendering hope, joy, and the potent power of other people.