Book Review: THE HALF-LIFE OF GUILT by Lynn Stegner
- elichvar
- 2 days ago
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Updated: 1 day ago
Lynn Stegner
The Half-Life of Guilt
University of New Mexico Press, Highroad Books / September 2024 / 280 pp / $27.95 Hardcover
Reviewed by Bobbie Marquis / April 2025
Environmental literature has a power of its own. To place human drama within a story in which the natural world is vividly introduced to the senses is a unique literary odyssey. In her seventh book, The Half-Life of Guilt, Lynn Stegner takes us on just that sort of trip. The daughter-in-law of writer Wallace Stegner, she has previously published three novels, a triptych, a short story collection, and an anthology of literary testimonials about the West. This new work dances among the human fault lines in a natural world brought to life with exquisite writing.
The Half-Life of Guilt tells the story of Clair Bugato, a botanist, and Mason Comstock, a photojournalist. They are lovers, and each has a family history that plagues them with guilt. In 1998, they take a road trip from northern California to Baja California, Mexico. Mason, a Greenpeace activist, is on assignment for National Geographic magazine, photographing the plight of the California gray whale as part of an initiative to protect them. The species' breeding waters are threatened by the expansion of a salt mining operation. Clair and Mason are in a new relationship, and she joins him on his mission. She plans to study the plants of the region, much of it desert. Beyond these goals are more existential struggles with their relationship and the weight of unresolved childhood guilt.
Stegner develops the characters in this novel in extraordinary depth. Chapters alternate between the present and past. We follow Clair and Mason traveling in Mexico; then we flash back to their childhoods. With this back-and-forth timeline, we see Clair growing up on a vineyard in Napa and meet her parents and twin sister, Nina. We see Mason in his lonely childhood in England, and we meet his father. Just as the couple's quest takes them deeper into a landscape unknown to them, the reader enters the crevices of Clair's and Mason’s family stories.
After a tragedy occurs when Clair is five, her family is broken. Clair takes on the role of caretaker for her sister. She must constantly maintain her twin’s sense of well-being by devaluing herself. Clair grows up suffocated by her relationship with Nina, compelled to conceal her talents and successes so that Nina will not feel diminished. She carries that self-deprecation into her relationship with Mason, accepting his cold, aloof affect without asserting her needs. Mason also bears a complex burden of guilt. His mother died while giving birth to him, and his father’s grief makes him cruel toward Mason.
Clair’s obsession with her twin is unwrapped powerfully throughout the narrative. On a hot airport tarmac in Mexico, she and Mason wait to board a small plane. A woman stands with her son, who has a cleft palate. Clair hands the child a candy and then, in her limited Spanish, attempts to speak to the mother. It is an awkward exchange, and Clair is propelled into reflection, thinking about Nina. “Divided things are supposed to fuse—palates, fontanelles, hearts and houses, nations. But sometimes they fuse in ways that are not good, not healthy; not knit together like the held hands of lovers after a fight, or the plates of an infant’s skull, but like tectonic plates, one sliding beneath the other.”
The tension between Clair and Mason mounts, and she gradually learns that, just as she carries her childhood burdens, Mason holds the trauma of his father’s brutality. He so guards his feelings that, when he learns that his father has died, he doesn’t speak of it until, in an angry outburst, he says, “My back’s a mess, we’re out of gas in a third-world country in the middle of a desert, I’m hungry, and . . . oi, dear old Dad kicked off last week, and I’ve got all that mucking up my guts.” Each of the main characters carries unresolved childhood-related injuries that complicate their adult lives and their relationship.
As they journey through the desert to the salt lagoons of Baja, the harsh settings sometimes mirror Mason’s dry aloofness. Beyond the intricate work of revealing the psyche of her characters, Stegner weaves this organic world into revelations about the characters with descriptions that are stunning and original. Clair observes and records the flora of the desert and surrounding oases: the unique plant life that changes with variations in elevation, aridity, and temperature. In one scene, Clair and Mason encounter an area filled with cirio—also known as Boojum trees. “The tallest, most mature of them have crowns of crazy arms, three, four, five of them waggling at the sky, with supplicating hands of white flowers at the ends of each.”
Looking at the Boojum trees, Mason asks, “how can something so silly-looking, so improbable, come to be?” Clair replies, “Every single aspect of the cirio is an adaptation to catastrophically narrow resources. That’s bound to make you a little . . . weird.” She continues: “Think of it psychologically. Think of it as a plant’s version of affect regulation. It controls the way it looks to the world to get along with the world and its . . . moods. And to get what it needs from the world. To survive.”
The Half-life of Guilt is a compelling title. The California gray whale is the solitary image on the book cover. Protecting its survival is the stated purpose of the couple’s trip, but the story also focuses on Mason and Clair’s tensions, attractions, and private worlds. The sense of danger mounts as they face threats of violence from the nefarious earth-moving contractor at the salt works. The adventure is also one of inner discovery. Stegner takes the reader through the Mexican desert to Baja, where she creates a place filled with animal, plant, and human life. Throughout the book, Stegner’s descriptions of the landscape go beyond the physical. The setting becomes a perpetual metaphor for the underlying human struggle—as Stegner describes Mason reflecting on the death of his father with whom he was unreconciled, “the dimming desert that manifests the landscape of perpetuity, of things that never find their ends, of problems that never die, of dreams that can’t possibly come true but that the dreamer keeps dreaming.” Even as Clair and Mason begin to heal, the reader is left to ponder how long guilt must last.
Bobbie Marquis is an MFA student at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She is the Executive Director of the Johann Fust Library Foundation in Boca Grande, Florida. She earned a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida.