While I'm Falling

I have found Laura Moriarty's writing convincing and moving since I first encountered it in a personal essay she read aloud at Exeter in the fall of 2001, a piece that I continue to cherish and that I think of together with Scott Sanders' "The Inheritance of Tools" and Chang-Rae Lee's "Coming Home Again." Since then I've read her first novel, The Center of Everything, which I loved and will read again, and now While I'm Falling, whose characters I half expect to meet sometime.
While I'm Falling is in one way very narrow in scope: it is the story mainly of a college student, Veronica, whose parents have just divorced, and secondarily of the student's mother, Natalie. The setting, in Kansas, has a radius of perhaps fifteen miles. But in another way the story conveys intimations of universality. Grace Paley said she wanted her characters to have "the open destiny of life," and Moriarty's characters share this with them. Life in her stories is uncertain and fluid; but its vicissitudes allow for recoveries as well as disasters. The outcomes of every kind all seem equally probable. As I read I sense no agenda besides truth. I swear I would recognize Veronica and Natalie if I met them on the street, and I would be glad to see them.