In the last 20 years, reprises of tumultuous 19th-century history have created quite a stir: consider Toni Morrison's Beloved, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Joyce Carol Oates' A Bloodsmoor Romance. Every Past Thing, the ambitious debut novel by Massachusetts native Pamela Thompson, mines similarly rich cultural and literary traditions. Thompson has definitely read her Emerson (and her Woolf, as is almost immediately evident), and her readers will retain select snippets from the eminent Transcendentalist's ouvre and biography.

However, Thompson's attempted synthesis of a dizzying array of events and personages—the Civil War, Transcendentalism, the Millerite cult, the works of Ruskin, progressive era reform, Justus Schwab, Emma Goldman and the New Woman, Ibsen, free love and feminism, McKinley and the war in the Philippines, and finally and focally, the life and times of the wife of the minor but talented Western Massachusetts-based painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer—is often uneven. But in spite of flaws in execution, Thompson's first novel has its rewards.

Every Past Thing was inspired by a striking painting by Elmer entitled "Mourning" (it graces the novel's cover). Slightly surreal (the artist has been dubbed America's Magritte) and dreamlike, "Mourning" was painted after the artist's daughter Effie's untimely death at age 10. Effie appears large and luminous in the picture's foreground while images of her parents are diminutive and dressed in mourning clothes.

Art critics could make much of the picture's relation to and reflection upon notoriously lugubrious Victorian mourning rites—however, Elmer's work has an innovative and ironic quality that is at odds with the notion of baroque, insincere Victorian funeral rituals. Thompson's novel often recalls Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse both stylistically and thematically (lengthy stream of consciousness monologues; revelations in hindsight, elegiac subject matter, attention to family dynamics). She seems, much as Elmer himself does with "Mourning," to encourage the modern reader/viewer to reconsider notions of Victorian clichés about grief and grieving. Though Thompson's prose is not immaculate or ground-breaking like Woolf's, she has moments of acuity and empathy, especially when discussing family tragedies and skeletons:

"As (Edwin Elmer) sometimes does, he wonders about his brother Darwin. If there had been a failure for him…Edwin had never known his brother from anything but story. (Darwin had walked alone the entire seventy-five miles home to Ashfield from Troy, New York, when he was just fifteen; he was "stubborn, stubborn, stubborn—but enterprising!")…What despair had so filled Darwin, and what portion of it is Edwin's own?…Had it been so for Darwin, who had seen five younger siblings die, before Edwin and Samuel were born? Death might have seemed to him like walking home to Ashfield: another place to go, where family was."

Every Past Thing, like its inspiration, "Mourning," is largely about grief and loss. But Thompson's characters—especially her protagonist, Mary, who wonders why there isn't a term for a mother who has lost a child—are both grief-stricken and pragmatic, even resilient. None indulges in the histrionic, perverse mourning rituals that the Victorian epoch is famous for. Thompson presents the facts and asks audiences to reconsider the myth of Victorian grief—in the 19th century, adults were likely to have survived several siblings or to have lost one or both parents before reaching adulthood. Conversely, parents were likely, as in the case of Edwin and Mary Elmer, to outlive a child. People died at home, not in hospitals. Thompson doesn't criticize Victorian woe; she simply suggests that death was more tangible in the 19th century than it is today.

Thompson is often at her best when treating Edwin Elmer, rather than her ostensible protagonist, Mary. Mary's love affair with a young anarchist and aspiring journalist often lacks plausibility; some of the textual love-making is a little purple ("'How beautiful it is,' she says. The heat in her like to wrestle the sky to earth and ravish the clouds. She wraps her legs tight around his hips."). She renders the conflicted, complicated relationship between Edwin, reclusive artist, and his rakish elder brother Samuel skillfully. (Presumably, these relationships are almost entirely imagined by Thompson.) And Edwin's anxieties about his talents are achingly relatable and allusive (Thompson evokes Woolf's Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, Eliot's Casaubon and others from that tradition of novels about the perils of the fine arts):

"He knows that the painting of the Arab isn't any good: Why be disappointed that his own standards match the Academy's? They were kind not to have rejected him entirely: That is what he would have done, had he been the arbiter. Such falsity in its lines. This could be forgiven in a young man…Funny, how embarrassment can flourish even internally, spoken to no one, growing in the darkness like a mold. It needs neither audience nor light of day, for its fantasies are filled to capacity with both. Here, a row of the Truth-in-Art men allotting him a phrase within parentheses in their docket (Kindly hosted by local amateur E.R. Elmer)."

Every Past Thing is a promising first novel—although not, perhaps, at first glance. Thompson's dense, Woolfian narrative technique is initially confusing and often seems imitative and derivative. The novel's rewards lie not in its presentation of American history but in its insights about character, loss and coping mechanisms. ?