There sometimes ARE books you can judge by their cover, and Kathleen Novak’s splendid short novel, "Do Not Find Me" is one of them. There’s a photo of a man hunched over on ice, fishing. Then, on the first page, the first paragraph, a narrator talks about her father who, like most of the older fishermen on the lakes of northern Minnesota, fished that way. He would call out "pay attention." The old fishermen knew "to pitch the chisel ahead of them before they stepped out onto the ice." The statement describes a way of life long gone by 2011 when the story begins, but it will resonate metaphorically.
Margaret is at her father’s cabin in the woods. He’s just died, and she’s left her own family to settle his affairs. He was the person she loved most and knew best, especially after her mother died when she was 10. As she goes through his belongings, however, she comes upon an envelope smudged with age, addressed to him in a feminine hand. It says simply, "Do not find me." Why did he keep it all these years? Could it be related to his steadfast refusal ever to take her to New York? Or his abiding love for Billie Holiday singing the blues?
Subtly, skillfully, Novak turns the statement about paying attention on the ice into a theme about loss, secrecy and the power of obsession. As the reader comes to see, but Margaret only partly discovers, her wise and beloved father, an elegantly handsome, intelligent, quiet man who worked as a jeweler, did not pay attention and "pitch the chisel ahead" on the metaphorical ice, when he was living and working in New York.
Back to that cover photo. The man fishing on the ice takes up only the lower third of the image. The upper part is an indistinct, mystical shot of the Manhattan skyline. Once the narrative moves back in time to 1962, the story turns to the father’s life in New York. He delights in the city -- its "affects," its "press of people with “nervous hands and grand gestures." And its femme fatales, one of whom catches his eye in a bar one night at Penn Station. He’s instantly smitten, but before he can say hello, she mysteriously disappears. He looks everywhere, and then, two years later, by chance, he sees her at a party in Greenwich Village. And thus begins his sustained longing for her, a kind of passion he never would have imagined he could feel, and that he will never feel again.
To tell more would spoil the ingenious plot Novak, a poet, has beautifully contrived that covers a span of 50 years in a mere 180 pages. But let it be said that the resolution involves confronting murder and receiving a copy of a poem by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which is addressed to a child by the name of...Margaret. "Do Not Find Me" is a haunting, memorable tale. That it’s a debut novel is remarkable.
