The Limits

by Nell Freudenberger

The Limits, by Nell Freudenberger, begins, “She was already underwater when the sun came up. Twenty-five meters down, the first light hit the rose garden in patches, like a hand-colored photograph.”

“She” is Nathalie, a French marine biologist. The “rose garden” is s coral reef she’s been studying for years on Mo’orea, a volcanic island in French Polynesia.

Nathalie is diving with Raffi, an islander who works on the boats, keeps the dive gear safe, and serves as a kind of liaison for the researchers and—forebodingly—corporate types who visit the island.

They return from a peaceful day beneath the sea to an urgent phone call for Nathalie. Her daughter Pia, who’s been staying with her father, Stephan, and his wife, Kate, is missing. She’s been unhappy since she arrived to attend an upscale private school a few months earlier—depressed, cutting herself, mercurial, resentful of her stepmother’s pregnancy. She hardly sees her father, a physician, who’s working day and night.

It’s spring, 2020, in New York, COVID cases climbing daily.

The Limits is a terrific juggling act, told from a variety of points of view: Nathalie, Kate, Pia, Stephan—and Kate’s high school student, Athyna. Each one compelling in its own right. Nathalie, who exploded her marriage for her scientific career, the most important thing in her life; Her ex, Stephan, whose life at the hospital becomes more real, more necessary than his life at home with his new wife, Kate; Kate, doing her best to connect with her high school students on Zoom and manage life with her very difficult stepdaughter; Pia, whose crush on Raffi propels her toward danger; and Kate’s student, Athena, a bright girl with too much responsibility at home and overwhelmed with anxiety.

Pia and Athyna connect one day when Kate’s on Zoom with her students and again, when Pia attends the class picnic. They exchange phone numbers and…interesting things happen, to say the least.

The Limits is a page-turner. It’s a story about divorce and its fallout, a story about a family struggling to make ends meet and the effect of that on a teenage daughter doing her best to make a good life for herself.

It’s a mystery: Where is Pia? What danger is she risking in doing what Raffi asks her to do?

It’s yet another fictional witnessing of the COVID pandemic.

The book’s epigraph is from “Crusoe in England,” by Elizabeth Bishop: Now I live here, another island, that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?

In The Limits, it’s as if, for a terrible time, each character is a small island in an archipelago—each one close to the others but unreachable due to circumstances they never could have imagined.