ELEPHANTS IN THE HOURGLASS

An American woman’s encounters with Asian elephants in their native habitat.

Picking her way out of a failed marriage, Frank takes inventory of “the woman I had once been—confident, curious, vivacious, a leader,” and determines that she was no more: “Dead or lost, I was not yet sure.” A chance conversation about the plight of Asian elephants, whose habitat is rapidly disappearing “in a war over diminishing resources of food and water,” leads Frank to team up with a photographer and pitch travel stories about the elephants and their protectors. The photographer, a well-published pro, is frequently impatient with Frank, who is clearly willing to do the work but is often a burden all the same: the photographer, at one point, says that she needs to be able to jump on the back of a motorcycle at a moment’s notice and head out for the story, while Frank is less spontaneous. Frank’s narrative has its moments, but too often her focus is not on the elephants but on herself: “I close my eyes on the drive, imagining myself as a war reporter, a woman who would put herself at risk to document important news to show the Western world all they do not know.” For much of the narrative she is not that woman, and the important news is merely self-important. As she learns to navigate the landscape and comes to know some of the elephants’ protectors, the narrative picks up a bit, but Frank is still inclined both to navel-gazing and to treacly New Age formulas (“I am being led by an unseen force. And all is interconnected, just as I felt one with the oxygen, oceans, and grains of sand in that moment by the sea”), and the elephants seem an afterthought.

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