The title of Fiona Mozley’s aston­ish­ing and absorb­ing new nov­el, Awake Awake,mir­rors the dual­i­ties that run like an under­ground riv­er beneath her prose. 

Nar­rat­ed in the first per­son by Mary, the sto­ry gush­es forth in a flood of mem­o­ries, most sur­round­ing her close child­hood friends — Amelia, Eve, and lat­er Eric, a Jew from New York City whose par­ents have relo­cat­ed to York. ​“Like New York, but Old York!” His par­ents like to joke. Indeed, the old — such as York’s 2,000 year his­to­ry, includ­ing its per­se­cu­tion of Jews — and the new — World War II, Viet­nam War protests, Sep­tem­ber 11th, and civ­il war in Syr­ia — are jux­ta­posed and recount­ed seam­less­ly with­out tak­ing the read­er out of the inti­mate, per­son­al sto­ry that unfolds. 

Mary is a pub­lished writer in her late twen­ties and, in addi­tion to mem­o­ries of her child­hood, she recalls out­ra­geous con­ver­sa­tions and events that she ini­tial­ly believes occurred. Lat­er, in psy­cho­analy­sis, she ques­tions them. Are those mem­o­ries root­ed in oth­er, ver­i­fi­able mem­o­ries, with one serv­ing as a faint reflec­tion of the oth­er, or are they made up entire­ly? In part, the false mem­o­ries are relat­ed to her grand­fa­ther, a Jew­ish man who hid his iden­ti­ty from his own fam­i­ly. He fought in World War II, and Mary believes his actions dur­ing this time are more con­se­quen­tial than any­one knows. Except her. 

Mary attempts to unspool the inter­twined threads of the past — what is known and what is secret, what is true and what is false — and uncov­er how and when her break with real­i­ty occurred. It is to Mozley’s cred­it that the read­er, too, skit­ters along the blurred line between real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy. The real and the sur­re­al, order and chaos, hero­ism and fool­har­di­ness, faith and doubt are casu­al­ly dis­cussed over cock­tail par­ties or else­where, much as they are in real life. 

The Holo­caust and oth­er atroc­i­ties serve as touch­points in the character’s child­hood. In one of the most affect­ing scenes, Mary and her class­mates bear wit­ness to a Holo­caust sur­vivor telling his sto­ry. One stu­dent is very dis­re­spect­ful. What does one do in such a sit­u­a­tion? This ques­tion is, again, mir­rored by a larg­er ques­tion: who speaks up and acts, and who sits idly by, whether in the Holo­caust or in every­day moments of life?

At the heart of the sto­ry is friend­ship and its unbreak­able bond. As adults Mary and her friends all go very dif­fer­ent ways, but their child­hood bond remains unshake­able and not just through their shared mem­o­ries of the past but also with­in the present. It is the descrip­tion of the friends and of their lives in small, ordi­nary moments lis­ten­ing to music or try­ing to nav­i­gate the com­pli­cat­ed roman­tic inter­ests of ado­les­cence that lingers, in a good way, after read­ing this evoca­tive, philo­soph­i­cal, and beau­ti­ful­ly ele­giac novel.