The Half-Life of Guilt‘s plot is a simple story about a couple on a difficult road trip. Mason, the codeine-dependent driver and a National Geographic photographer, will take photos in Baja, California, for a story about an environmentally sensitive Mexican development project. Clair, his romantic partner and a plant biologist, comes along to study native plants in the area.
The core narrative is the ten-day road trip from the Bay Area down the length of California and into Baja. They travel south through a sunstruck desert region and desolate Mexican towns to Cedros Island off the Pacific coast at the town of Guerrero Negro, the site of the world’s largest salt production facility, which happens to abut a breeding ground for the nearly extinct California gray whale.
This is an engaging tale in and of itself, but it floats above turbulent currents. In a family-owned Napa Valley winery and vineyard, Clair grew up dominated by her twin, Nina, a childhood that informs Clair’s adult relationships. Central to this elaborate flashback is a gruesome childhood event infused with guilt that is a permanent inflection point in their lives.
Lynn Stegner (daughter-in-law of the late renowned author Wallace Stegner) expertly places her characters under tightening pressure within the close confines of their vehicle. During the long journey, which includes running out of gas deep in the desert and a series of other memorable set pieces, the couple exhibits an increasingly complicated and unstable relationship, from amorous to quarrelsome and beyond. Upon arrival on Cedros Island, Mason and Clair are finally liberated from their vehicle but find themselves led to a local guesthouse that is a thoroughgoing horror.
Their odyssey through the desert is a search for Rubio Cantú, a drug dealer and the alienated son of the businessman behind a proposed expansion of the salt facility that will threaten the whales. The quest culminates in the couple’s dramatic meeting with Rubio and his developer father and its fraught aftermath.
So far, so good. The story is fully realized, with multi-dimensional characters and an increasingly complex tale. But why call The Half-Life of Guilt a tour de force? The excellence of this novel lies in Stegner’s masterful writing.
As to point of view the author writes from a very close third-person perspective. We are always intimately inside Clair’s head, and it is a most interesting place to be, a keen consciousness filled with insights into human relationships and survival.
Regarding narrative structure, strung along this linear storyline is the fully elaborated childhood backstory and a series of retrospective half-scenes, all presented in a way that avoids the confusion often found in complex narratives where time is the free variable.
In addition, the vivid, granular detail throughout The Half-Life of Guilt is remarkable. Stegner uses small brushstrokes, for example, to describe Clair’s father working in his vineyard:
“The sunlight was coming through the brim of his straw hat in tiny diamonds, so that his pigmented face was twinkling with stars.”
Describing the guesthouse shower:
“[t]here is only one source of water, a pipe that protrudes from a hole on the wall …The walls are peeling turquoise paint, and the drain…is clogged with a sodden brown muck bristling with hair. There is no hot water.”
Stegner also provides lengthier, detailed depictions, describing Tijuana as “a scabrous litter of cinderblock hovels … homes left half-finished but already lived-in and overcrowded clinging cheek by jowl to the blasted … treeless scarified slopes … like windblown trash pressed up to the corrugated metal fence.”
When her sister leaves Clair after a visit to her dorm room, Clair hears Nina “clacking away in cheap pumps, the 2/4 time signature of her footsteps … scooped up almost immediately by the traffic …carrying people to homes where there were other people who might worry if at some point in the long night they didn’t hear the key in the lock and the door swing softly open and the light of companionship reach into the darkened room, like a prodigal friend at last returned.”
The Half-Life of Guilt embodies a modern form of the traditional journey motif, in this case a quest with two goals: protecting nature and definitively determining the contours of the travelers’ relationship. Regarding both the desert plant life that Clair studies and her life with Mason, Clair notes, “[n]owhere is life more cunning than where it must do with less of the one thing it needs the most.”
Although the denouement might occasionally feel a bit plot-heavy, The Half-Life of Guilt has the elements of an excellent novel: it’s an engrossing story with vivid detail, fully dimensional characters, and the unmediated interiority of the protagonist’s mind. Stegner’s extraordinary crafting of language throughout makes for a truly outstanding novel.