BOOK REVIEW

A THOUSAND MILES FROM NOWHERE

By John Gregory Brown

Little, Brown, 276 pp. $26

Henry Garrett is falling apart. The man who pulls up at the Spotlight Motel somewhere in Virginia is exhausted, confused, and almost out of money. He has evacuated his home in New Orleans fleeing Hurricane Katrina and, after days on the road, he has run through all his resources, including, it seems, his mind.

When the kindly motel owner sees his home address on his license, she assures him that he need not worry. “You will stay here with our compliments, Mr. Garrett,’’ says the owner, an Indian immigrant, in her formal, stilted English. “You will stay as long as you would like to stay. You have lost everything, yes?’’ The motel owner’s question, it turns out, is more perceptive than she realizes.

However, this one chance meeting launches a tale of redemption that is both believably prosaic and incredibly, quietly moving.

Henry has in fact lost everything, although it takes time for him to admit to Latangi, the motel owner, and to himself what has happened. Most of it happened before Katrina. In a series of flashbacks and memories, Henry’s past is revealed. Before the storm, Henry and his wife, Amy, suffer a miscarriage. He withdraws into himself and into a kind of apparently delusional depression that causes him to quit his job and move out of his house. Soon after, his wife gives up and leaves New Orleans. Just before the hurricane Henry moves into an old grocery store, which had become a gathering place for misfits like himself. In this store — known as Endly’s — Henry and his motley colleagues trade stories and memories. With Katrina’s arrival, even these are lost.

The day after arriving in Virginia, Henry finally strikes rock bottom after accidentally hitting and killing a man while driving back to the motel. Clearly, though, the barely functioning Henry did not have far to fall.

Henry’s unraveling seems, in part, genetic: As we learn from his memories, Henry’s father also had grown increasingly detached and depressed before he finally disappeared. In part, Henry’s gradual breakdown is likely the result of trauma: Not only did Henry grow up without a functional father, but his mother also withdrew as she mourned. And surely the catastrophe that befell his city has not helped, cutting Henry loose from his already very tentative mooring.

He is not alone. Latangi has suffered loss as well. Mourning her husband, Mohit, who was a better poet than a businessman, she has translated his one great work into English. When she asks Henry to read it, he not only recognizes its genius, he begins to feel grounded again. Slowly, he is drawn into other narratives when a well-meaning court secretary takes him in as part of her own redemption. Soon, Henry is involved with the dead man’s nephew as well, and when a figure from his past — an Endly’s habitué — appears on the evening news, Henry is ready to reclaim his shattered life.

This is not entirely a mystical fable. Henry receives some mundane help as well, when a vet with PTSD gets him on Prozac. But in John Gregory Brown’s telling, it is the stories that save him, and since the book is told from Henry’s point of view, this emphasis makes sense.

Brown, a New Orleans native, taught at Sweet Briar College for two decades and is now at Deerfield Academy. He has a deft way of writing about loss and redemption, at once physical and immediate. Although Henry has walked away from his teaching job, his mind returns repeatedly to the ending of Kate Chopin’s novel, “The Awakening,’’ in which the protagonist drowns herself, and images of drowning recur. Returning to New Orleans, Henry begins to unspool as the flood waters seem to rise again. “He gasped for breath, felt himself sink below the surface.’’ Only this time, a friend is there to ground him, “her hands below one arm, trying to help him up, trying to lift him. From the water? There was no water.’’

The result is palpable, and the relief as Henry once more finds his narrative — the thread that holds his story together — is profound. “We have reached a place too dark to see,’’ he reads in Mohit’s great work, “so we shall go together.’’

A THOUSAND MILES FROM NOWHERE

By John Gregory Brown

Little, Brown, 276 pp. $26

Clea Simon, a novelist and freelance writer, can be reached at cleas@earthlink.net.