Held

Held, a 2023 novel by acclaimed Canadian poet and author Anne Michaels, follows four generations of a British family over the course of the turbulent 20th century. At once sweeping and deeply intimate, Michaels’s poetic narrative weaves a kaleidoscopic vision of love, trauma, and the transcendence of memory, infusing lyrical scenes of family life with the scientific and philosophical ethos of the times. Held won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize and was also shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Award; the novel has been translated into more than 45 languages.

This guide refers to the 2023 Alfred A. Knopf hardcover edition of Held.

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide contain descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicide, and wartime violence against civilian populations.

Plot Summary

Held’s fragmentary, time-shifting narrative, which covers 122 years, opens in 1917 on the banks of a river in Flanders during World War I as a severely wounded British soldier named John drifts in and out of consciousness. As he waits for rescue, he thinks about death, fate, his soul’s possible immortality, and his wife Helena, whom he first met by chance at a café when she mistakenly disembarked from her train at the wrong stop. After the war, John returns to civilian life in northern England, enduring constant pain from his leg injury. Demoralized by this and by his memories of the war, he nevertheless manages to hide much of his anguish from Helena. Worst of all, his mother, with whom he was very close, was killed in a Zeppelin air raid when he was on the front lines. 

Finally returning to his prewar trade as a portrait photographer, he hires a skilled assistant, Mr. Robert Stanley, despite the latter’s aloof manner and lack of references. One day, while developing a photograph, John is astounded to see the ghostly image of a middle-aged woman hovering beside the subject of the photo, a young army veteran. The young man identifies the woman, whose face radiates an “intolerable longing,” as his recently deceased mother. This “miracle” occurs twice more with other customers’ photos, and John feels on the verge of an extraordinary breakthrough: empirical evidence of a spirit world that proves the immortality of the soul. However, his refusal to exploit this phenomenon for profit leads to friction with his assistant, and he soon suspects that Mr. Stanley has cleverly faked the “spirit photos” out of greed. 

Crushed by this revelation, John dies by suicide, drowning in a nearby river. However, in his last moments of life, he comes to see the “longing” on the ghostly mother’s face as a profoundly beautiful “image of something true even in its corruption, despite its corruption” (80). Succored by the warmth of this eternal tenderness from beyond, he senses his late mother floating beside him, and with her, his wife Helena. Death, when it comes, feels like night falling, a “small correction” into a slightly different state of being.

The narrative skips forward 31 years to 1951 and shifts to the setting of London, where John’s widow, Helena (who has never remarried) now works in a bookshop. Every day, she yearns for her late husband. One of the shop’s regulars is a world-famous artist named Graham Rhys, who becomes intrigued by some quality of Helena’s and offers her a generous sum to pose for him in the nude, though she is now 60 years old. Rhys claims that he doesn’t find the human body very interesting, but he hints that nudity makes a subject more vulnerable and exposes the person’s secrets. 

After she sits for him multiple times, Rhys agrees to let Helena paint his portrait as a means of revealing herself. Using a paintbrush for the first time since her marriage with John, whose photo backdrops she used to paint, Helena feels “ravenous” to be painting again. However, Rhys, not having anticipated her talent, grows disgruntled by her ability and abruptly drops her as a model. 

Soon afterward, Helena has her weekly phone call with her grown daughter, Anna. Hiding her tears of “longing” as she listens to Anna’s voice, Helena discovers after the call that she has sketched a perfect likeness of John’s face on a notepad. In doing so, she feels that she has somehow “freed” her late husband from imprisonment.

Thirteen years later, Anna’s daughter, Mara, has entered a romantic relationship with Alan, an investigative journalist whom she met overseas at one of the trouble spots where she regularly volunteers as a doctor and aid worker. The two live together in Suffolk, a short distance from her father Peter, a hatmaker who is originally from Italy and with whom she is very close. One day, to the consternation of both Alan and Peter, Mara—who is four months pregnant—agrees to go overseas once more to serve as an aid worker. Peter cannot forget that Mara’s mother, Anna, devoted herself to the same kind of work and was killed overseas in 1964 when Mara was a little girl. The narrative suggests that Anna’s ghost visited the family house on the day she died, becoming yet another of the novel’s ghostly visitations. 

After Mara leaves for the airport, Alan and Peter, deeply afraid for her, spend the night together in Peter’s flat, where they are visited by Peter’s “oldest friends,” Marcus and Sandor. Peter tells them about a customer named Helen James, who came to collect a hat that her late father left at Peter’s shop for repairs. Alan shares a story about his own departed father, whose life memories, seemingly lost to Alzheimer’s, sporadically and miraculously returned in patches during his last years. Suddenly, the doorbell rings. It is Mara; she has changed her mind about leaving and has returned to them for good.

The novel backtracks 74 years and shifts to a suburb of Paris, where Lia, the future mother of Peter, meets a photographer in the wilderness while gathering kindling. The two of them discuss photography and Darwin. Eventually, Lia senses the “permission” of her late husband’s ghostlike presence and sleeps with the photographer. Intuiting that she has conceived a son by him, she plans to name the child Peter, after her departed husband.

Seventy years later, in Soviet-controlled Estonia, a composer named Paavo writes choral music that draws on the forbidden spiritual longings of the old hymns that his wife Sofia sings to him in bed. This “satire” is his covert rebellion against the state. Not long afterward, the apparatchiks arrest him for subversion, and he, Sofia, and their infant son Aimo are thrown out of the country. For a time, Sofia has recurring nightmares of Paavo being swept away by a turbulent sea after blithely ignoring her many warnings. 

The scene then shifts to 1908 in Paris, where the French mother of Peter’s friends Marcus and Sandor writes wistfully to her Polish husband, Eugène, who died suddenly some time ago. Reminiscing about their first meeting, she describes a party thrown for the Nobel-winning scientist Marie Curie, who figures centrally in the book’s next section. 

The narrative then shifts to the coast of England in 1912, six years after the death of Marie Curie’s husband. Marie Curie has fled France for England after being decried in the French press for having an affair with a married man. Her main protector and confidante is the English physicist Hertha Ayrton, another of the novel’s many widows. While visiting a pharmacy to buy a sleeping draught, the two women are initially worried to find a Frenchman working there. However, this pharmacist, Marcus, is the half-Polish son of Eugène, who, far from disdaining Marie for the scandal, greatly admires her for her work and personal struggles.

In 2010, back in Suffolk, Helen James wears her late father’s hat (which Peter repaired) whenever she takes a walk in the woods. Fascinated by the theory of evolution, Helen believes that there are some things, such as a spirit world, that the sensory organs cannot yet perceive, just as an eyeless salamander cannot see the sun. Nevertheless, she feels certain of the presence of her dead father, whose “hand finds hers” (212) whenever she takes a certain turn in the path. 

Finally, the narrative shifts to Finland in 2025, where Paavo and Sofia’s son, Aimo, follows Anna, his former lover (or wife), from the café where they met years before. He is gratified to be able to “remember” her well enough to find her again. Anna, who is Mara’s daughter, senses his presence and turns. However, Aimo is “not quite seen” and exists just as a peripheral glimpse, “like something moving at the edge of a forest” (220).