'Evening Ferry' a sad-eyed ride

Evening Ferry
By Katherine Towler
MacAdam/Cage, 372 pp., $25

The only people who seem to be happy on Snow Island -- Katherine Towler's fictional outcrop off the coast of New England -- are the summer people, those insouciant incomers who willingly, and temporarily, trade the privations of offshore life for its clock-turned-back beauty. Not for them the miseries of island winters, the dangers of quahog fishing, or the inbred, gossipy, locked-in perspective of the tiny resident population. For the Snow Islanders, however, life seems unceasingly arduous and restricted, with rarely a holiday in sight, especially for the women. As Phoebe Shattuck notes in her journal, ''Living on an island seems like work, pointless work."

Phoebe's journals make for one narrative strand of ''Evening Ferry" (the second novel by Towler in her trilogy set on the island), the other being the story of her daughter, Rachel, returned to Snow in 1965, a year after Phoebe's death, to take care of her injured father, Nate. The journals, left for Rachel to find by Nate, but never discussed, span the years 1930 to 1947. They expose the arc of Phoebe's marriage and its gradual transmutation from the romance of elopement into a tired partnership formed of habit and duty. Threaded with evidence of Nate's fecklessness and unthinking cruelty, they also explain how Phoebe, despairing and lonely, found her faith, which came to be mixed with intense feelings for the island's priest, Father Slade.

Romance in Towler's universe seems to be a regular harbinger of disaster. Readers of her first novel, ''Snow Island," will be familiar with the notion of a woman's love delivering a punishing fate. In that book, another inexperienced islander, Alice Daggett, drifted into a clandestine love affair, which veered into tragedy as a result of unthinking male behavior. A second crushing blow, delivered randomly by events during World War II, obliterated all hope of her escape or salvation. Alice is revealed, peripherally, in ''Evening Ferry" to have settled for stolid acceptance of her lot. So, largely, did Phoebe. Will this be Rachel's destiny too?

Her return to the island is already an admission of failure, of a kind. Life on the mainland permitted various freedoms -- a relaxation of her mother's strictly enforced Catholicism, and marriage to a non-islander, Kevin. But Rachel's marriage has collapsed, leaving her in sexual limbo. Back on the island, she must deal daily with a childhood lover, Eddie, now her father's sidekick in the home repair business, and the flirtations of Alice's eldest son, Nick, 18 and soon to graduate from the minuscule island school where Rachel takes over as teacher.

Much of this slow-paced novel is devoted to the overlapping daily rounds of the two central women, mother and daughter. One tended her own children, laboring to put food in their mouths while keeping her own spirit alive; the other cares competently for other people's children, while feeding her father and licking her wounds. In the long central sections, the story sags under its burden of the mundane. Also, the stripped prose that in ''Snow Island" evoked with limpid simplicity the mood of the island alongside a young girl's emergence into womanhood here seems more often banal and aimless.

The novel changes gear, however, in its closing chapters, in which a sequence of revelations about Phoebe forces Rachel to recast her entire family scenario. Loose ends are tied up with alarming speed, leaving Rachel -- like Alice -- sentenced to life on the island, older, wiser, but not convincingly happier.

Melancholy hangs like sea fog over Snow Island, a place where Towler's principal characters lead lives of emotional isolation, in fitting reflection of their geography. While the Shattucks occupy the foreground, minor figures behind them echo the theme. George Tibbits, another character more fully fleshed in the first book, is a quiet presence in various scenes, an aging islander steeped in regret and mournful contemplation.

Indeed the Snow Islanders overall seem a sad, possibly doomed tribe, circumscribed by the micro-world of the island yet scarcely equipped to survive in the big wide beyond. The young people must choose between desultory work and scant partnership options if they stay, or virtual exile if they go. And yet there is a pride and suggestion of lineage among them, a sense of superiority over those soft incomers who spend the easy months on Snow but endure none of its true tests.

Towler's two books, with their overlapping characters and philosophies, interlock neatly, like pieces of a larger jigsaw already fully imagined. But their near-unwaveringly plaintive tone begins to seem like an imbalance, in need of correction. The author's vision of her community could well develop into a compelling achievement, but only if it starts to offer a broader tonal palette. Otherwise Snow Island begins to seem like another name for the island of lost souls.

Elsbeth Lindner is a writer and publisher who lives near New York City.