Onlyville

Chris Knight is a copy editor at Canadian Press.

The novel begins in 1974 with Anna Berman on her way to a year alone at
the family cottage at Onlyville, a small tourist spot off the east coast
of America. She is hoping to leave her boyfriend, Sal (an intellectual
writer who is great at starting articles but not at finishing them),
behind her. But he finds out where she is and moves in. So does her
niece, her niece’s hippie friend, and her father’s runaway
girlfriend. So much for peace and quiet. In fact, Holz does such a good
job of describing the arriving hordes that the first chapter becomes
almost painful to read, the literary equivalent of squealing brakes but
without a crash to put a stop to it.

The mood changes in Chapter 2, however, as Holz puts her talent to work
narrating Anna’s past, along with her relationships with her parents,
her brother, and eventually Sal. The scene shifts from Anna’s
childhood and her early adulthood to the 1970s, always in big enough
chunks to explore the depths of her feelings at each point of her life,
and always with enough clues to tie the pieces together into a life
gradually unfolding on the page. By the novel’s end, Anna is leaving
Onlyville again to find peace—but she leaves with a peace she has
found there as well.

The fictional technique of traveling over water is nothing new, but
Holz uses the tiny, removed setting of Onlyville to focus on the
character of Anna away from the hubbub of the rest of the world, which
is present only in the constant coverage of Watergate from Sal’s
radio. Her discovery of what causes her to love and what motivates her
to find peace makes the novel one that starts as choppy water and ends
as a smooth mirror of self-knowledge and understanding.