Inside [Paperback]

Alix Ohlin is a writer born in Montreal, now living in Pennsylvania. She has been praised by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee as "a skillful storyteller, quick-witted and wry."

The novel opens with a striking scene of Grace experiencing sudden disorientation on a wintry Mount Royal in Montreal:

"Now, at the end of January, it had finally snowed all night and all day, at last enough to ski on. She slipped around the Chalet and headed into the woods, losing the vista of Montreal below, gaining muffled silence and solitude, the trees turning the light even fainter. One skier had been here before her, leaving a path of parallel stripes. On a slight downhill slope she crouched down and picked up speed as she moved around a bend.

Turning, she saw the branch or whatever it was too late. Though she tried to slow down, she wasn't quick enough and ran right into it and was knocked out of her skis, falling sideways into the snow, realizing only when she sat up that what had tripped her was the body of a man.

The air torn from her returned slowly, painfully, to her burning lungs. When she could breathe she said, `Are you all right?' There was no answer (...) Kneeling down to check his pulse, she saw the rope around his neck. Thick and braided, it trailed beneath him, almost nestled under his arm, and the other end rested on a snowbank - no, was buried underneath it - and on the other side she could see that the branch it had been tied to had broken off."

Inside follows up on this engaging opening scene of attempted suicide with the story of four characters - Grace, a therapist, and 3 others who are - or have been - connected closely to her.

"Grace" is a clever choice of name for the protagonist, because grace is in fact a central theme in the book. How uplifting it can be, but also how accidental, arbitrary, and ultimately inseparable from the gray zones and mixed motives that constitute human nature.

Recommended !

This is the first book I've read by author Alex Ohlin, and as cliche as it sounds, it really was the type of novel that completely drew me into the lives of the four characters she portrays. The stories were heartbreaking and real, and I grew to actually care about the characters and the troubles they were facing. I couldn't put it down. If you're looking for action and adventure it's probably not the best choice, but if you like a good character-driven novel then I highly reccomend it.

New York Times book reviewer William Giraldi called it "insufferable schmaltz." The Giller committee short-listed it for one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards. Montreal-born Alix Ohlin's "Inside" has certainly provoked strong reactions, enough to make me curious about the origin of all the fuss.

The opening of Ohlin's novel describes Montreal psychotherapist, Grace, cross-country skiing on Mount Royal, where she comes across a man lying face down in the snow. She soon realizes that the man has unsuccessfully hanged himself from a tree and, instantly, Ohlin reveals the story's central questions: when someone has suffered something terrible, how far does another person's duty go to help? What do the helper's motives become beyond simple instinct?

In subsequent chapters, the rest of the book's cast emerges. Annie, Grace's self-harming teenager patient, eventually pursues an acting career in New York, where a runaway who reminds her of herself takes over her life; Tug, that man in the snow, tries to shake the demons of an encounter with a gruesome episode of African history; and Mitch, Grace's ex-husband, flees a troubled new relationship to do social work in the Canadian north and quickly finds himself in over his head.

Ohlin gives each character's story equal weight, partially overlapping them across time and place. This method can seem daunting to the reader and perhaps the author's strength as a short story writer gets in the way of writing a fully cohesive novel. Indeed, at times "Inside" reads more like a collection of linked stories containing disorienting shifts in space and time. But, if the reader pays close attention, Ohlin’s combination of smooth prose, thematic complexity and structural ambition makes for an equally accessible and demanding novel.