Against the Wind

by Jim Tilley

Overview

Against the Wind is an elegantly written story of relationships involving six principal characters, strands of whose lives braid together after a chance reunion among three of them. A successful environmental lawyer is forced to take himself to task when he realizes that everything about his work has betrayed his core beliefs. A high school English teacher asks her former high school love to take up her environmental cause. A transgender adolescent male raised by his grandparents struggles to excel in a world hostile to his kind. A French-Canadian political science professor finds himself left with a choice between his cherished separatist cause and his marriage and family. An accomplished engineer is chronically unable to impress his more accomplished father sufficiently to be named head of the international wind technology company his father founded. The Quebec separatist party’s Minister of Natural Resources, a divorcée, finds herself caught between her French-Canadian lover and an unexpected English-Canadian suitor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597098359
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Against the Wind is Jim Tilley’s debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.

http://www.jimtilley.net/

Against the Wind is Jim Tilley’s debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.

http://www.jimtilley.net/

Against the Wind is Jim Tilley’s debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.

http://www.jimtilley.net/

Against the Wind is Jim Tilley’s debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.

http://www.jimtilley.net/

Against the Wind is Jim Tilley’s debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.

http://www.jimtilley.net/

Against the Wind is Jim Tilley’s debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.

http://www.jimtilley.net/

Against the Wind is Jim Tilley’s debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.

http://www.jimtilley.net/

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt One

The details are not unusual. He collapsed during the meeting; the paramedics arrived. They carried him on a stretcher down the freight elevator and gave him some nitroglycerin. Making it to the hospital on time without getting stuck in New York City traffic—that was a bit unusual. It turned out to be a minor heart attack. He stayed in the hospital less than a week, recovering from a routine procedure to install stents in two obstructed arteries. It was the longest he’d ever spent confined to a room.

It gave him time to think. That part is also unusual. Ralph had led a hard-charging life that had given him little time to think about anything other than work. Time he’d chosen not to take because he knew the answers to his important questions were not what he wanted to tell himself. It was easier to focus on the court cases at hand. The notion of a bucket list had never entered Ralph’s mind until the episode with his heart. But lying in bed all day with only the occasional stroll down over-lit hallways, he imagined the upcoming canoe trip, a reunion of old camp friends. They’d been hard to find after more than forty-five years, and sadly, harder to convince.

The past three months brought another reunion, this one by chance, although—reflecting on it in the hospital—Ralph suspected it was bound to have happened with three one-time grade-school friends coming together again: he and Lynn, high school sweethearts; he and Dieter, high school rivals, and Dieter the loser in the battle for Lynn’s affections. All thrown together in a fight over wind farms in the county where Lynn now lived.

All in all, the unfinished business of past lives was brought forward and played out, offering opportunities to put things right.

Excerpt Two

The bed has been turned down, but the curtains aren’t drawn. As Ralph rummages through the minibar, she turns off the lights and stands at the window, gazing down at the lit tree, most of its leaves yellow, some green, all about to become the past, but still holding on. Beyond the tree, out on the promenade, the inlaid stone compass on which they stood not more than five minutes before. Southeast to where he lives, west to her house. One hundred thirty-five degrees of separation. She looks south across the lake. Red lights blinking in unison along the horizon—wind turbines on Wolfe Island warning aircraft to stay clear. If you must fly low, don’t do it here.

Ralph is flying high. He joins her at the window, a glass of wine in each hand. “To us,” he says. “Better the second time around.” Not the second time, she thinks. Though they’d come close, they’d never made love as teenagers. She takes a sip of wine and puts her glass on the nightstand, then draws the curtains closed. Ralph puts his glass beside hers. He unbuttons her blouse and unhooks her bra. “My God, you’re beautiful.” He takes off his shirt, undoes his belt and lets his pants fall around his ankles. She eases herself out of her skirt.

“This is as far as we got on prom night,” she says as he sweeps away the covers with one hand and pushes her onto the bed with the other.

“Almost,” she says.

She awakes at eight thirty, Ralph still asleep, rolls out of bed, goes straight to the window, and opens the curtains, only to be blinded by the sun scintillating off a shimmering Lake Ontario. Shielding her eyes, she peers out to Fort Henry on the hill. Sees the Martello tower on the spit of land at the tip of the Royal Military College campus. Stares across the lake to the wind turbines strung out like beads on a giant string along the expanse of the island, their blades turning slowly, the red beacons no longer discernible. Once around every three to four seconds, a slow spin in seeming defiance of the stiff breeze. Petals on giant white stalks, reacting to the impulse of nature, snatching a fraction of the wind passing through. Mesmerizing, those blades rotating gently on the horizon, reflecting the morning sun. Adjacent pairs sometimes in unison, strange harmony, as if they are bound to each other, dancing to the same music.

Editorial Reviews

"The writing is brilliant and economical, especially about the environment, and there’s all sorts of information here for the taking, but essentially this is a novel of character. And a very good one." —Library Journal

"Tilley handles decades long character arcs with empathy, resulting in a resonant and humanistic novel." — Kirkus Reviews

"Against the Wind is an intricate and elegantly compelling novel, notable for both its political and personal acuity. Jim Tilley writes with deep feeling for his characters and great command of his fascinating materials." — Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes

"Against the Wind is a big old-fashioned novel with contemporary concerns: gender, adultery, wind energy, business acquisitions. But at its heart, Jim Tilley’s debut novel is about the ageless concerns of love and loss and hope that we all share." — Ann Hood, author of Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food

"Poet Jim Tilley’s compulsively readable debut novel, Against the Wind, is a rumination on how the past stretches its long fingers into the present. Set in Canada and the U.S., the novel tells the story of Ralph, who is coming to terms with old rivalries and lost love. Told mostly from Ralph’s point of view, and touching on such topical issues as the environment (wind energy) and transgender parenting, this absorbing and tender new novel offers us a view into the male psyche and reminds us of the difficulty of being a man in a culture that judges us all too harshly." — Cai Emmons, author of Weather Woman

"In this contemporary novel of manners, the personal, the professional, and the political are inextricably intertwined. Tilley writes with insight and clarity about people we recognize and situations that hit close to home. Whether he’s writing about changing relationships or chronicling a complex international business deal, Tilley writes with insight and clarity about people and situations we recognize. An important novel about characters facing the winding-down of their professional lives and the approach of life’s third act." — John Van Kirk, author of Song for Chance

"Politics—personal and environmental—form the colorful canvas upon which Jim Tilley paints Against the Wind, a novel that squarely faces the issues of today: the breakdown of families, the struggles to accept a transgender child, and the international policies and rivalries of global energy industries." — Anne D. LeClaire, author of The Halo Effect and The Lavender Hour

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2019

DEBUT Against a backdrop of wind-farm aesthetics and politics, plus the Quebec separatist movement, Tilley introduces a small but fascinating cast of characters whose lives intertwine intellectually, politically, and romantically. Ralph, a lawyer for the energy industry, is about to retire and wants to win back Lynn, an antiturbine activist and a love from decades back. Lynn is married to dodgy professor Jean-Pierre, who is having a long-term affair with a government minister, Monique. Then Ralph meets and (almost) dates Monique: it's not just a love triangle but a love quadrangle. Add in Jules, a transgender teen with a passion for turbines and keeping Lynn and Jean-Pierre together against all odds, and Dieter, an engineer and absolute enemy of Ralph and unsuccessful suitor of Lynn, and the cast is complete. No spoiler: who ends up with whom works itself out. VERDICT The writing is brilliant and economical, especially about the environment, and there's all sorts of information here for the taking, but essentially this is a novel of character. And a very good one. Unbelievably, this is a first novel from an author with a PhD in physics from Harvard. One can hope there will be many more.—Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Library Journal

2019-07-01
Tilley's debut novel after several collections of poetry traces the connections between a disparate group of people in the United States and Canada.

It begins with Ralph, a well-off lawyer in New York City, having a health episode that prompts him to revisit a canoe trip he undertook in 1965 with several of his high school friends. Ralph's high school girlfriend, Lynn, is a teacher; his old rival, Dieter, now works for a company with a contentious wind farm project in the works. Jean-Pierre, Lynn's estranged husband, also has ties to the wind farm and often ponders his younger days, when he was deeply involved in Quebecois separatist politics. Many of the characters are in late middle age, with decades of personal history and professional rivalries behind them. The main exception, generationally speaking, is Jules, the grandson of Lynn and Jean-Pierre, raised by them after the boy's parents died in a plane crash. Jules is a high school senior with an interest in engineering, which connects him to many of Lynn's old friends. Jules is also transgender, which leads to a few awkward moments between him and Jean-Pierre, who is portrayed as being less understanding of Jules' gender than Lynn. Tilley's novel charts the shifting balance of power, both emotional and financial, within this group. Tilley handles most of his characters with sympathy, though an early revelation about Dieter helps to establish him as the closest thing this novel has to an antagonist. It's a slow-burning work but written with a solid attention to detail—even if its focus on quiet conflicts and interpersonal dynamics can feel too restrained at times.

Tilley handles decadeslong character arcs with empathy, resulting in a resonant and humanistic novel.

Kirkus Reviews