ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME

A woman stuck in the same day discovers she’s not alone.

Tara Selter, the narrator of Balle’s planned seven-volume epic, is in her third year of living in a world that has stalled on November 18 for her, but now at least she has some company. A man named Henry Dale, whom she met at a lecture about the Roman Empire, is in the same predicament. This gives her a sense of normalcy and alleviates some of the loneliness that she feels—in the second volume she hopscotched around Europe to recall what changing seasons felt like. But this connection—plus a couple more who enter the story later—also stokes a sustained discussion about how they can put their November 18 loop to good use. Do they use that time to deepen connections with family? Should they try to track all the deaths, accidents, and mishaps that happen that day and look for ways to intervene and prevent them? Does it make more sense to develop more systemic solutions? This entry in the series is more steeped in matters of sociology and philosophy than its predecessors, but it’s also surprisingly light on its feet. Tara and Henry’s relationship, now headquartered in Germany, isn’t a romance (Tara is devoted to her husband back home in France), but it’s also not quite a friendship either, based less on shared experiences than it is a shared challenge. Not only does she have the immediate challenge of figuring out how to live in a world that reboots every morning, but she needs to find a reasoning for being within it. Is it now her job to “somehow optimize reality, either through a gut renovation or by fault-finding and adjusting the details?” Can we, living in normal time, do the same? The cliffhanger ending suggests her job will get more complicated, but for the reader the series’ seductive qualities are only deepening.

A brainy and beguiling meditation on time and purpose.