By Karen Schechner

By the second paragraph of Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, the reader’s sucked into a New England gothic tale of Maine mist and fog. By that time, Miranda Donnal has, at three years old, lost her mother to the sea and been quartered with her emotionally removed father on tiny, isolated Crab Island. It’s a moody story—similar to The Shipping News—that’s quiet on writing and plot, but loud on emotional intensity.

When we recently met for dinner at Le Grainne, Sweeney, who lives with her girlfriend and their six-month-old in Brooklyn, said she’d gotten taken to task for that quiet style in one of the book’s reviews. But the Boston-born writer, with a New Englander’s straightforwardness, doesn’t seem prone to foamy exposition. Quiet was something she was working toward. She talked about striving for Elizabeth Bishop’s famous evocative reticence: “Bishop’s aesthetic of quietness and creating something for people to reach to...is what I always find so beautiful and want to emulate.” And why change a mesmerizing line like, “A few months after we arrived my mother disappeared into the fog and didn’t come back”?

Because the writing is spare doesn’t mean it can’t deliver a literary ride—in this case from Maine, where Miranda’s father is too busy translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses to notice his daughter, to Manhattan, where Miranda susses out her father’s past and sexuality in a process like Alison Bechdel’s in Fun Home. Myths from Metamorphoses of water nymphs and gods and goddesses morphing into swans and trees run throughout, providing readymade metaphors for Miranda’s own transformation as she works out her sexuality.

Sweeney has been pointed to as an up-and-comer by the press and has earned an avalanche of (for the most part) positive reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and others. Maybe it’s because she came of age in the publishing industry at Riverhead and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but she seemed unfazed by all the attention. Instead, she was more interested in critiquing the critics and staging her own New vs. Old Media cage fight.

“When you get a [print] review, you can definitely feel the once-remove of people trying to get the word count right,” she said, speaking from experience. (She’s written book reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Village Voice). But blogs she finds “totally pleasurable.” She appreciates that people post their reviews online immediately after finishing the book. “It feels really fresh...When they’ve read my book and honestly say what they’ve thought of this or that. That’s the best part of publishing, the gratification that you’ve given someone a bundle of hours to have a pleasurable, quiet time.”

Sweeney talked about Ron Charles’ Washington Post review of Among Other Things, in which he references David Leavitt’s article on “post-gay” fiction—fiction that involves lesbian and gay characters, but not as the fulcrum of the book. Charles suggests that Among Other Things is post-gay, and although Sweeney considers hers to be a lesbian novel, Charles’ take on it pleased her. That is, until a Queer Studies academic friend rained on her parade and asked her if “post-gay,” wasn’t a bit of a problem, something like “post-feminism”—i.e., over. The question led Sweeney to wonder about the visibility of queer literature, and while she appreciates her work being “post-gay,” she also wants the lesbian content to be recognized, which left her with something of a dilemma.

But post-gay or not, at the center of the novel, which Sweeney originally thought to base on The Tempest, is a father-daughter relationship and the altogether common process of coming to an understanding of family, original and otherwise. A subject that Sweeney, being a new mom, must have on her mind. “One of the things about coming of age,” she said, “is learning that your parents are human beings, learning the limits of human nature.”