The Sound of Silence

DECEMBER
By Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
Alfred A. Knopf, 239 pages, $23.95

A chamber-piece in a minor key, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop’s literally muted new novel introduces 11-year-old Isabelle Carter, who hasn’t spoken in nine months—"280 days," she reminds herself, since "February 29, not a real day, anyway, a day not to get out of bed, to eat, to drink, to speak." Wilson and Ruth, her well-to-do father and mother, have appealed to countless therapists, consulted manuals on autism and quarreled with school officials; after meticulously assessing Isabelle’s classroom performance, the principal complains that she’s been patient "to the max," an expression that would rightly alarm legions of Manhattan private-school parents.

Amid threats of expulsion and increasingly hostile domestic debates, Isabelle remains imperturbably tight-lipped. Not so December; as in her previous book, the desultory coming-of-middle-age tale Fireworks (2006), the author evinces a fussy preoccupation with gratuitous details—the sort of tight-focus minutiae that enliven a short story yet clog a novel—as when Isabelle inspects a therapist’s teeth: "She watches his tongue come snakelike from between his teeth and dab at his dry, cracked lips. His teeth are yellowing and lined; his top front teeth are ridged, sawlike, at the bottom. She can imagine the silver fillings that must line his back teeth, and the same cracks on the back of the tongue she used to notice in her old science teacher."

Duly briefed on her ex-teacher’s oral health, we read on: "She can tell that his mouth is dry as well as his lips; the little spit there is clings like foam to the tip of his tongue as his mouth forms her name. Mouths, she thinks, are strange things." So are disquisitions of this sort—we are elsewhere treated to in-depth analyses of toaster ovens, bacon sandwiches, and supermarket shopping carts—in a novel that ostensibly has places to go.

Or perhaps it doesn’t. Ultimately, there’s little promise in its premise; it’s all too easy to empathize with the exasperated Wilson and Ruth, and though Isabelle makes for a sympathetic heroine (this despite the book’s queasy jacket art, which features a lock of spittled hair trailing from a girl’s bee-stung lips), one feels she could do with a vigorous spanking. Her elective hush plays like capital-S Symbolism, prettified and vacant, a ballpoint doodle posing as a hieroglyph. "[I] should get it over with, just speak," she muses. Just so long as it’s not about dentistry, we plead.

The author would seem well suited to this sort of old-fashioned domestic drama. Her prose is crisp and poised, and her characterizations convincing: These people, if not their compulsions, feel lived-in and authentic. Yet Ms. Winthrop’s pacing (glacial, until a spring thaw near the home stretch) and scope (narrow) still mark her as a short-story writer straining to fill excess pages. She’s an accomplished writer, one who will someday surely hit upon a story worthy of her talents and worthy of the telling. This saga of silence happens to be neither.

Daniel Mallory researches modernist literature at New College, Oxford. He can be reached at books@observer.com.