Off Course: Straightforward novel delves into distractions of the head, heart

In 'Off Course” (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG, 287 pages, $26), the new novel by Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna Michelle Huneven, a young woman retreats to her parents' remote cabin to avoid distraction as she completes her dissertation. As the novel's title suggests, it's a miscalculation. Distractions - mostly men, though there is also a bear - abound on the mountain.

Cressida Hartley, once an aspiring artist, has turned her attention to economics. Her proposed dissertation seeks to blend the two as she researches the value of art in the marketplace. Ensconced in the very cabin she hated as a child, Cressida enters relationships with problematic men - the first much older and promiscuous, the next emotionally damaged and married.

Huneven's style is largely unadorned and her narrative is straightforward. Her dialogue always rings true, which is important in this story that is undergirded by looming divides of age, social and economic standing, and temperament.

Like the varied landscape that is central to the book, Huneven's prose offers up unexpected moments of beauty. Here Cressida has fallen back in with her married lover: 'She thought that she would never again inhale that mix of soap and sawdust and tinny cologne, never clasp his work-muscled shoulders and arms, brace her forehead against that straight bar of collarbone. Never grab the coarse, black-brown hair wired with white or glimpse that roan tooth he so assiduously hid. Lovely to be flung over and around him again, his familiar, lived-in body.”

'Off Course” explores the many ways in which the heart's desire can undermine the head's best laid plans.

Rob Cline is a writer and published author, marketing director for University of Iowa's Hancher and director of literary events for New Bo Books, a division of Prairie Lights.

Book reading

What: Michelle Huneven reads from 'Off Course”

Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday April 16

Cost: Free