Fifty-odd years in. Twenty-one floors up. J.'s life unspools in loops, a wavering sequence of repetitions: blistering walks to the store, naggingly beautiful vistas all around, purposeful swims, lustful daydreams, a faltering cat, a mistrustful duck, a few soggy dates, some mulish memories of lovers who don't deserve them, each ill-chosen man candidly, compulsively dishonest. She translates Ovid, thirty lines a day, and her work is interleaved with her life, the wet words of each story soaking through the page into the other. She has wishes and regrets, but she can't tell if they're blooming or fading away. She chats with neighbors down the hall and spies on strangers high up in buildings across the street, jogging on treadmills, whoring and johning, doing origami, each in a cube of light suspended over Biscayne Bay.

J. is adrift but becalmed. She doesn't pretend otherwise. But she's not ready to quit. Does love require luck or will? It's a question that matters to her, but does it matter enough? Alison's plot is atmospheric, but her observations are concrete. This is as it should be. What she truly nails is the way the setting of the developed Florida coast—the blazing sun, the bright sea, the towering white buildings, which upon closer inspection are revealed to be riven with cracks and pocked with decay—affects the mind and spirit. It is paradise and it is the step right before paradise, and you can't quite find your footing in either.

A couple hundred feet below, the cruise ships have become skyscrapers, dwarfing structures on land and bleeding their slop into the water. But at least they move. So now the skyscrapers aspire to be ships. J. calls her building, Nine Island, the Love Boat, a pleasure palace gone to seed, its aging pool dripping stalagmites of decaying concrete into the garage below. Comic and forlorn, much like J. herself, the Love Boat longs for the sea but finds itself stuck in dry dock.

Toward the end, Alison's plot quickly but convincingly draws into a thread. She finds ends and beginnings in a place people come to when they'd rather stay in between. ( )

This (non-fiction?) book is putatively "up-my-alley" (a translator of Ovid repurposes his works on love in her effort to explore and cope with her own sexuality as menopause sets in), but in the final analysis it fell flat for me. The Ovidian references were either too subtle or clever, or were too weightless to garner intrigue (which is what Ovid advises us to develop if we are to be successful at love!). Like Ovid, Alison writes with tongue in cheek about her misadventures--but unlike Ovid, her "character" J desires connection (rather than conquest) to serve as an antidote to her loneliness. ( )

I made it to page 39 with this book. Definitely not my type of book. The author switches from translating Ovid and speaking of ex-boyfriends and living in a "retirement home" in Miami. I just didn't care any more to read the rest of this book.

When do you give up on romantic love? Jane Alison's novel Nine Island has a main character contemplating just this question as she watches life go by from her glass fronted high rise condo on the Venetian Islands on Miami Beach.

J. is translating, and sometimes changing, Ovid's tales into English. She's also a recently divorced, middle aged woman who lives with her aging, incontinent cat and has just returned to her condo after a wasted month trying to make a go of it with an old boyfriend, Sir Gold. As she works through Ovid's take on mythological stories of love and lust, she contemplates whether it's time for her to give up on romantic love. While pondering this and what it would mean for her life, she swims in the building's pool, watches her neighbors, takes care of her elderly mother, and tries to help a wounded duck. These things might feel disparate but they form the structure of her life and they come to clearly define her despite their initially perceived smallness. J. feels stranded and alone in her life but still harbors a wildness in her just like the duck she wants to rescue, a wildness that shows itself in her imaginings and her translations.

This literary novel is very much character driven and introspective. Told entirely in first person with J. narrating her own story, the story flows over the reader, with a dreamlike lushness to the writing but also a fevered restlessness underpinning the languid pace of the story. Alison manages to pull off this seeming contradiction beautifully. The novel is incredibly descriptive and the landscape, the shabby building, and the injured duck become metaphors for the loneliness of aging without connection or relationship. The novel is composed of brief chapters that tell of past and present and fluctuate in tone dependent on what part of the story they are recounting. Alison does an amazing job showing the yearning and vulnerability of an intelligent, solitary woman of a certain age. There is a taut sexuality to J.'s life, and emotional connection where it is least expected. This is a smart and accomplished novel, one that very much requires an agile and educated reader to appreciate it. ( )

Jane Alison’s Nine Island is a captivating look at love and loneliness. J, our narrator, is a middle-aged woman who retreats to a glass high-rise condo somewhere on Miami Beach, hiding under the glare of the harsh sun and pastel colors, where she can nurse some emotional wounds and take stock of her life. Should she give up on love? “I’m not old yet, but my heart is sick with old desire, and I’m back in this place of sensual music to see if it’s time to retire from love.”

J is recovering from a divorce and a string of ill-advised hook-ups with ex-boyfriends. To top it off she’s working feverishly as a translator of Ovid’s stories of metamorphoses. There’s not much that goes on in this slim novel except the character’s musings about her triumphs and mistakes in life, but it is so concentrated with searing emotional truth about the vulnerability of being alone and the pathos of love found/love lost that I can say it is one of the most riveting things I’ve read this year.

What makes Nine Island so compelling is that J is sharp in her observations of her inner and outer worlds. She turns the gaze not only on herself but also on her quirky neighbors. She’s reeling from broken relationships with men but surprisingly it’s the women she turns her gaze to. Ovid’s stories were about women—women chased, women violated, women transformed. She sees these women everywhere in her neighbors, her mother, and, yes, herself. The novel is a heady mix of fantasies and reflections of the past—failures, near-triumphs, happiness. In a twist of the spinster stereotype, we see her dealing with her elderly cat who is deaf, blind, and incontinent. It could veer into cringeworthy territory but the way J talks about that daily relationship cuts and burns without the hint of sap.

Water plays a recurrent motif throughout; it’s J’s work on Ovid seeping into the world around her: she swims almost daily at the pool. Puddles of rain, humidity, and tears abound. Often her interactions with others happen at the pool. It’s where she talks to others but also swims alone. This watery setting is a powerful backdrop that Alison wields with poetic precision without being precious or baroque. The tone of the book is one of a confession and jotted notes. Many of the chapters are just a few paragraphs long; some are achingly lyrical; others are razor sharp and funny; and a few are giddy, droll, and sexually playful. Interconnected vignettes—I was blown away by the range. Alison makes it all come together brilliantly.

The best thing about Nine Island is that it feels brutally honest and real. There is a tendency to overlook women who get to a certain age and live alone as not worthy protagonists. They become invisible, irrelevant, without a story worthy to be told. No children? No husband or partner? You might as well retire from life and give up. But J says ‘screw that.’ Her life is full of spark and wit and self-awareness, and she’s far from giving up. ( )