Liesel Litzenburger

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I'm proprietary about my landscape: I'm hard on a book that doesn't get it right.

Liesel Litzenburger, native of Harbor Springs, gets it right. Her novel The Widower is often beautifully heartbreaking. As it follows its battered characters from tragedy to the first glimmers of redemption, it places her interesting people exactly within their environment. By the third chapter, Litzenburger has established her method for telling her story. We know by then that this novel will be told in episodes that move through four or five major characters and that these episodes will jump from the present to various places in the past.

Swanton Robey and his wife have gone off a turn above Lake Michigan on a cold January evening and have crashed onto the ice below. The wife is dead, and Swan almost so. So The Widower begins. As Robey begins his years of recovery, we begin to learn the stories of the people who cluster around him, to help him, knowingly or not, as he learns to live and to love again. Litzenburger carries her story along with a memorably lyric prose, one that is good with character but often exquisite with landscape. Just listen to this short passage, taken from near the end of the novel: