I started jogging again during the pandemic. I was living in Traverse City, Michigan, at the time, and there were eventually about twenty different trails I would jog in rotation. I kept finding trails that were more and more remote, and on the first day I drove to the VASA Trail, I passed by a globe suspended on a pole near where Bunker Hill Road intersected with a bike path. An informational plaque identified the globe as Neptune. It was a mystery to me until I started biking on that bike path and came across more planets. Sometimes I would find a nearby trail tucked into a sliver of nature I hadn't realized existed, like behind a Home Depot. It was on one of these overlooked local trails that the universe clicked into place. On Boardman Lake, less than a mile from my house, I found Earth, Venus, and Mercury in quicker succession than the other planets. Finally, near the public library, the sun.
     Lindsey Drager's novel, The Avian Hourglass, begins with the unnamed protagonist discovering a concrete marker for Saturn overgrown with earth and tall grass past the dead end of a deserted road. Because I returned to jogging over the pandemic, I was pretty sure that finding the other planets would be key to the novel's plot—but everything else in the book couldn't have been a bigger surprise. I had things easy, as the Traverse City planets are all on bike trails, but the planets in The Avian Hourglass are in seemingly random positions in their orbits around the sundial of the "no-name town." The text also never provides names for the woman's triplets, whom she'd been carrying as a surrogate before the sudden deaths of their parents. She decided to raise the triplets with the help of an uncle on their dead mother's side, Uri. The woman and Uri live side-by-side in a duplex, and he cooks all their meals while at work on a one-man play based on the myth of Icarus. She works for now as a bus driver, but it's a "ghost route" that no one rides anymore and it's a job she knows she'll soon be losing to an automated bus. Though the novel is quite experimental, there's something gratifyingly sitcom-like about how characters pop by the duplex, in particular Aunt Luce, who dispenses wisdom and cigarettes as well as memories of the woman's father, who died some years prior from a deterioration of his mental health.
     Though the narration never ventures outside the town, the novel's whole world is suffering two major environmental crises: nobody can see the stars at night anymore because of smog and there are no more birds. It is perhaps from a desire to "see" through the pollution that the woman harbors a fierce desire to become a radio astronomer. She has become convinced that her sense of self-worth is entirely bound up with this pursuit. Unfortunately, she has failed the necessary radio astronomy test four times in a row, and the countdown to her fifth and final opportunity to take the test is a dominant source of tension in the first half of the novel, which as a whole is told in short numbered fragments that descend from 180. The radio astronomy facts she's trying to memorize are just one of the text's braided threads; others include fascinating word etymologies supplied by Luce, scraps of Uri's Icarus play, and real or imagined diegetic dialogues formatted like a script. One thing the etymologies reveal is the multiplicity and braidedness of every single word we use, as well as the unlikely kinship of words like theater and theory. A list of words without clear etymologies recurs like a chorus: girl, bad, curse, bird.
     Art and artifice become a means by which the woman and the community cope with disappointment, grief, and ecological doom. In addition to Uri's play, which receives weekly stagings in a field, to great popularity, her friend Sulien builds a star house with holes in the roof that allow the town's children to see what a starry sky looked like for the first time in their lives. These are stars that can only be seen during the day, via the sun's starlight through pinpricks in the roof. Somebody has also been building giant replica bird nests along the woman's bus route, and maintaining these nests with Sulien becomes a new source of meaning for our protagonist—as does the search for the additional planet markers that her discovery of Saturn catalyzed, a town-wide artistic happening.
      Like Drager's first novel, The Lost Daughter Collective (Dzanc), the form of The Avian Hourglass is highly complex but feels inevitable, offsetting various competing symmetries with a continuous supply of surprise. About midway through, I momentarily thought I'd caught a glitch in the novel's worldbuilding. The woman notices a pattern in the location of planets, telling Sulien, "Saturn, the god of seed, was found at the edge of an old farm. Mercury, god of communication, was found near the post office. Uranus, the god of rain, was found near the water tower." I thought, Wait a second—these landmarks of the town wouldn't have just happened to be located at the required distances from the sundial. Sulien has the answer: "It's almost as if the town was built over the system instead of the other way around." This novel had an uncanny knack of providing answers at just the moment a question would appear in my head. I made the note Do we ever actually hear the story of the Girl in Glass Vessel? literally in the section break before the novel finally delivered the piece of integral lore so important to the town and our protagonist, ninety-two pages into the book.
     The search for the planets brings together the town's warring factions, the "YES folks" and the "NO folks" who argue their case every week on Saturday at "The Demonstration." At first, I was not entirely won over by the reductiveness of the allegory here, and the novel further lost me—not for long—when the hunt for planets causes some townspeople to become "MAYBE people." As if this is any kind of solution. Here, The Avian Hourglass risked becoming immediately less nuanced at the moment it allegorized nuance. A flattening and reification of complexity. I was quickly won back over in part because I wanted so badly to be won back over, but also because it becomes obvious that the woman—that all of the novel's main characters—feel as uncomfortable with maybe-ness as they do with binary choices. Despite its meticulous construction, the novel feels fiercely resistant to taxonomies—and maybe also resistant to "resistant-to-taxonomies."
     I will refrain from giving away too much, but the movement of the novel's final pages is truly astonishing. Readers have been picking up on the possibility that the novel itself is the glass vessel of the Girl in Glass Vessel story, or at least one of multiple vessels, and so many meanings click into place—click into possibility—as the retrograde section numbering moves into single digits. The Avian Hourglass becomes not just an allegory for climate disaster, for political polarization, for the porousness of all boundaries (geography, identity, language, politics, genre), for art's purpose in times of crisis, and for Jean Baudrillard's notion of the hyperreal, but also an allegory for allegorizing itself, for storytelling and worldbuilding. In stunning fashion, The Avian Hourglass becomes the object, objective, and operation of its own diegesis.