Pictured are author Sharon Dilworth and her book, "To be Marquette." (Photo illustration courtesy of Northern Michigan University)

“I was miles away from Marquette.”

— Sharon Dilworth

There is a timelessness to Sharon Dilworth’s novel “To Be Marquette.” Her characters probably resemble many of us who questioned the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. For all practical purposes, the Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall fell. But that didn’t quell existing fears of Soviet missiles being launched upon our cities. It is strange to think back on those days when Project ELF was a top secret government-funded project created during the Cold War in the 1970s. This creation would span 84 miles across the Upper Peninsula, embedded in bedrock for an emergency coded response to a nuclear attack.

Sharon’s fiction blows across that bedrock and into the lives of characters, who are connected to Northern Michigan University. She elegantly describes Presque Isle and the life of a student crashing down a path and stumbling over a petrified root of stone-landing on her chin, which suffers a gash that sends her character, Molly, to the hospital. There is a moral question here embedded in the fiction of environmental damage caused by Project ELF and its Cold War.

Turning the pages, there are markers set in time and space, or maybe not even turning a page to see the cover is a painting of the old railroad trestle spanning Front Street. It declares Marquette, Home of Northern Michigan University.

“To Be Marquette” is 278 pages that divide now and then-time and emotion-and what a former NMU student remembers of her years at Northern. It is a novel wrapped in memory. Her mentor, the elusive but always present Dr. Robinson, lays his ear to the ground of history, listening for what is transpiring in history: his office door is covered with photographs. “Some were black and white, and those were mostly winter scenes. Tree branches against snow, making all kinds of shapes and shadows. The rest were of Lake Superior in all seasons. Bright fall leaves. Great waves coming up over the break wall in the lower harbor, the spray crashing against the rocks.”

There are silhouettes of memory running throughout this time capsule published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2024, much like Raymond Queneau’s observer at a cafe watching thousands of silhouettes oscillating and jostling others, not behaving as humans.

This Paris street is teeming with silhouettes of a particular time that will expire the next day.

A kind of subdued French artistry is at work in Dilworth’s fiction, for her observer is naturally herself and she is admitting the impossible: to be precise about nature or a certain history in history is extremely difficult.

This is a novel for Marquette, as the title proposes, and for those who have lived in Marquette. It suggests what’s significant here. An ore dock that may never disappear and a trestle that has a physical, and very physical as it was, marker that for years welcomed weary travelers home.

Home is this novel by Sharon Dilworth. Her characters’ emotions softly seethe in scenes

where we witness a familiar Presque Isle, a Lake Superior in its many changing facets of beauty and destruction, a deep snow and then more snow even wetter and colder and deeper. Her historical marker is not the Vietnam War but the Cold War’s promise of annihilation. It never happened. But what did happen was Project ELF: an emergency communication system to be buried in bedrock spanning miles in case of a nuclear war. The idea that submarines waited for short-coded ultra-classified messages to retaliate seems more like fiction than reality now.

What is real is Sharon’s quietly crafted but riotously felt novel in its French flaps and beautifully designed cover art based on Tim Lindquist’s painting.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Russell Thorburn is a Marquette resident and the author of “And the Heart Will Not Quicken,” a collection of poetry from Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, that will be launched at Peter White Public Library at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 27. Dylan Trost and Patrick Booth will provide music.