The Measured and the Missing

Some writers range widely, and some dig in one place. Troy Taliancich digs. Across a shelf that now includes a science-fiction trilogy, a work of autofiction, a physics novel, a small literary novel set in coastal Connecticut and a five-book young-adult series, he returns again and again to the same ground. That ground is the gap between a person and the record kept of them.

This essay reads that body of work as a whole. It isn’t a biography, and it isn’t a diagnosis. It’s an attempt to describe the sensibility that comes through the pages: what it fears, what it values, how it thinks, and how it has changed. The books are worth reading this way because together they form something rarer than a set of novels. They are a sustained argument with one question, carried out in public, with each book answering the one before it.

I. The instrument

Every book on the shelf contains an instrument for reading a person.

In The Sextant Protocol the instrument is literal: a closed-loop brain implant that cures depression by keeping its wearer in range, and that answers a weekly question on his behalf. In the second book, the consent question is “Is there anything you used to feel that you don’t?” In the third, a mother hears her soldier son’s voice on the phone and asks the question the trilogy turns on: “Is that your fine?” The horror of the series isn’t that the machine is cruel. It works. It produces “fine,” and “fine” is what everyone around the wearer wants to hear.

In The Deep End the instrument is the narrator’s own archive: thousands of texts, emails, timestamps and screenshots, kept by a man trying to understand why a three-year relationship ended. Halfway through, he notices what the archive really is: “a record of the hours we were apart.” The more carefully he keeps it, the less of her it contains.

In The One Who Asks the instrument is a scientific protocol, a blind procedure a physicist designs to tell a real discovery from a relapse of illness. In Ferry Weather it is a groundskeeper’s eye, reading ferry schedules, marquees and a neighbor’s syllabus as coded messages. In The Record it becomes a whole civilization. In a drowned future New Orleans, a thing is true only if it is said to a face, on the hour, and written down by a clerk. Writing has no standing, and silence is entered as consent.

Seen side by side, these are one machine in different housings. Each is built to know a person, and each loses the person in the act of knowing. The books keep asking whether anyone can truly see another human being. They also ask what happens to the one who is recorded but not understood: the man whose “fine” is generated, the woman whose silence is read as yes, the lover whose every gesture is filed as evidence. A writer who returns this often to a single question isn’t short of ideas. He is circling something that matters more to him than any plot.

II. The archivist’s mind

Taliancich writes like someone who trusts documents more than memory. That habit is the signature of his style, and its strengths and costs explain most of what readers praise and criticize in his work.

His narrators quote messages verbatim with the time they were sent. They check one date against another. They correct themselves on the record when they find they’ve misremembered. The protagonist of The Sextant is a lab data manager, and the trilogy introduces him through that habit: “He noticed the later. It was his job to notice when a specification said more than it meant.” The Record turns the habit into law. Its hearings are tense, procedural set pieces in which a single clause decides a life, and cold readers consistently single them out as the best scenes in the series.

The second half of the habit is the “two readings.” In The Deep End, every uncanny event, whether a book appearing on a library shelf, a phrase repeated at a board meeting, or a toy left as a gift, gets an ordinary explanation and an extraordinary one, and the narrator refuses to choose. He names this as the book’s method early on: “A man who expects both outcomes cannot be corrected by either of them.” Later he confesses its danger: “I have spent a long time letting could have do the work of did.”

The third element is visual. The narrator of The Deep End thinks in shots. The first time he sees the woman at the center of the book, swimming laps in a red suit, he composes her into a frame before he knows her name. “Film is the language I have,” he says, and he holds himself to account for it: the very first thing he ever did with her, he writes, was compose her. The same eye recurs throughout the shelf. Rooms are described as sets, and moments are lit as if for a camera.

These habits make the books rigorous. Readers have noted that the calendars in The Record and The Sextant Protocol hold across hundreds of pages, and that the prose is clean sentence by sentence. The same habits also produce the work’s best-known weakness. Having made the reader feel something, the narrator often stops to measure it, explaining what a scene meant, flagging what will matter later, or announcing that something is now “on the record.” The archivist can’t leave a moment alone. It is the instrument’s habit turned on the page, and nearly every cold reader of every book has named it.

III. The narrator on trial

The most unusual thing about these books is how little they spare their own narrators.

The Deep End is full of self-indictment. Its narrator calls his fascination with the woman’s faith and her Ukrainian childhood a kind of exoticism, “the only honest word for it, even if it isn’t a flattering one.” He catches himself building her a pedestal and sees what the pedestal did: “You can only do that to somebody you have decided is better than you.” He admits that while he believed his building was watching him, he was in fact watching a neighbor closely enough to give him a private nickname, so the surveillance he feared most was something he was doing himself. After a long chapter on a supermarket shelf he thought was sending him messages, he concludes: “I was looking so hard at the shelf that I never checked the other end of the line.”

That severity extends across the shelf. The groundskeeper in Ferry Weather rereads his own book about the woman who left him and passes judgment on it: “Everything in it is true and none of it is her.” The narrators are rarely the heroes of their own stories. More often they are the defendants.

This self-scrutiny sits beside its opposite: a strong wish to be heard and answered. The books are generous to almost everyone, including antagonists. The Record’s chief clerk wins by procedure, without malice. The Sextant’s executives are sincere rather than evil. The same books are hungry for a reply, and in the autofiction that hunger is focused on one person. Being severe with oneself while hoping to be understood by someone else is the emotional engine of the whole body of work. It’s also why the books read as confessions as much as stories.

IV. Grief: the room that doesn’t empty

If measurement is the shelf’s great subject, grief is its ground.

The image that best captures how these books understand grief comes from The Sextant, spoken by a prosthetist explaining phantom limbs: “It’s not the body missing something. It’s the brain having built a room for something and the something moved out.” Love, in this view, is architecture. It doesn’t come down when its occupant leaves. It stands empty, still wired and still waiting.

Ferry Weather makes that image domestic. Its grieving groundskeeper becomes a counter of things, “a man at a window with nothing to do with his hands, making sure the fence was still the fence,” and it gives the problem its sharpest formulation: “The wanting is still in effect whether or not the person is.” The Deep End finds the same idea in a single lyrical turn: “Since I lost her, no sun has set without Marina on my mind. I would like that to sound less like a line than it does. It is a description of the west.”

The trilogy goes further. It argues that grief must be felt to be survived. The Sextant’s hero has been cured of depression so completely that he can’t mourn his drowned brother, and the book is his fight to get the pain back from the machine. His family, Croatian oystermen in Plaquemines Parish, carries the trilogy’s creed: “You felt the thing, entire, and you did not die of it, and the not-dying was the faith.” The book ends on his release: “And standing there, he cried for his brother.” In these novels a mind spared from grief isn’t healed. It’s absent.

The Record adds a social side. Its grief is for the erased, people struck from the ledger and made legally nonexistent, and in its fourth book the loss becomes literal when an aunt dies in the fire that burns the city’s archive. The register enters her death as “in the fire: dead. Not entered.” The mourning that follows is told almost wholly in single words spoken by her sister at the stove and the tomb. Across the shelf, the deepest feeling happens where the record can’t follow.

V. Delusion: the loss with an author

The shelf’s most daring idea is that grief and delusion are related, and that delusion is one of the ways grief tries to make sense of itself.

The Deep End is where this idea lives. Its narrator, in the eighteen months after a breakup, comes to believe that his building is staging his life, that his glasses might hold cameras, that what’s happening to him is a show built toward an ending in which he and the woman he lost are reunited. The novel never settles whether he was ill, inspired or right. Its insight is that the conspiracy and the grief are doing the same work. If everything was arranged, then what happened meant something and someone was paying attention. A loss with an author is easier to carry than a loss without one.

One of the book’s invented Interludes, a scene the narrator imagines but was never in, puts the whole thesis in a single sentence: “The conspiracy and the diagnosis say the same sentence.” The profile of the man the imagined conspirators would choose turns out to be the clinical profile of the illness. Seen from inside, the two stories can’t be told apart.

The book also understands what makes such beliefs so hard to give up. They are often flattering, not frightening. When the narrator finds a flyer that seems written for him, he stops himself: “That is the dangerous kind of sign. Not the one that scares you. The one that congratulates you.” A delusion that makes a grieving person feel chosen, watched over and central to a story is warm, and that warmth is its grip.

In these books, recovery doesn’t mean discovering who was behind it all. It means accepting that a loss can be real, and survivable, with nobody behind it. The Deep End’s most devastating moment is an anticlimax. After a year of suspecting hidden rooms, the narrator sits in a board hearing that was actually recorded and concludes: “Whatever I have believed about hidden rooms, this is the one hidden room I actually got into, and there was nobody in it.” The book doesn’t treat that emptiness as a relief. It treats it as the beginning of a different grief: for a world where things happen without being meant.

VI. Silence and consent

A third current runs under grief and delusion. It’s the question of who owns a person’s words, and what a silence means.

In The Sextant Protocol, the implant’s weekly question can be answered by the device. The wearer’s “fine” may not be his own, and the series builds toward a legal ruling that “a consent instrument which cannot be refused is not a consent instrument.” In The Compass, a soldier’s network reports that “The Window asked forty men and one man answered.” The trilogy’s moral climax isn’t a battle. It’s a young man asking each of his fellow soldiers, out loud, what they want, before the machine can answer for them.

The Record makes this its whole world. Its heroine, Wren, can’t speak in rooms. For years a friend has spoken for her as her licensed “Voice,” saying her sentences better than she would have. The book’s hinge is a line any reader who has frozen in a meeting will recognize: “The sentences were fine. It was the room.” Wren then learns that her own childhood silence was entered as consent to erase her aunt, and that her mother signed the paper that made it possible. The mother’s confession is the series’ first great scene: “I signed it so your silence would never be yes.” Over five books the series moves from silence taken from a girl, to silence she gives on purpose, to a new law with which the finale answers the first book: “A silence has no speaker.”

Across the shelf, the worst thing that can happen to a person isn’t to be harmed. It’s to be spoken for: to have one’s words improved, generated, inferred or entered without being said. The best thing is to be asked. One of the trilogy’s characters says it plainly: “But I’d have been asked.”

VII. From the window to the other side

Read in the order they were written, the novels show a clear direction. They move steadily away from the person holding the instrument and toward the person it is pointed at.

The Deep End is narrated from the window. Its narrator knows this and says so, but he can’t leave it. The woman at its center exists mostly as quotations and his readings of them. Ironically, she is fullest in the Interludes, the scenes he admits he invented. One of them grants her the interior the rest of the book can’t reach: “Everything she ever said to me about us, she said in her third language. Everything she sends here, she sends in her first.”

Ferry Weather reworks much of the same emotional material with the paranoia removed, and reaches the verdict its predecessor couldn’t. Its narrator realizes that his record of the woman, however accurate, isn’t her. The book also lets her answer back. One of its imagined Rooms gives her a real irritation at being read: “She would like, once, to be the meaning of nothing. To choose Camus because he’s short.” Its moral is spoken by a neighbor about the woman’s choices: “She’s not nice. She’s good.” And its central statement of love is hers, not his: “Someone looking at you and getting it right — that’s the thing.”

The One Who Asks gives its final word to a daughter. The revised Sextant Protocol finds its best scenes in the women who notice what the machine misses. There is a mother who writes down every “fine” that isn’t her son’s, a wife on a porch refusing a device, and a mother in Houma sewing pads to shield a platoon. And The Record is told entirely by the person being recorded. Its heroine isn’t the one with the instrument. She is the one the instrument is pointed at, and the series ends with her deciding, in a room, exactly what will go into the book and what will stay out of it.

This is the most hopeful arc on the shelf. Book by book, the author practices the empathy his first narrator admitted he lacked. He moves from watching people to imagining how being watched feels, and from narrating a woman to letting women narrate.

VIII. Place: rooms, buildings and water

Taliancich is a writer of specific places, and his places are always partly instruments themselves.

The Cotton Mill of The Deep End is a converted industrial building, “you live inside somebody else’s old use of a room,” and it becomes the narrator’s whole world: its hallways, its courtyard pool, its board meetings and its security cameras. Its architecture shapes his fear. Two people can share four walls for a decade without meeting, and the same walls can feel like a set built for an audience.

Water runs through everything. The Deep End begins and ends in a pool. The Sextant Protocol begins with a brother drowned in the Gulf and an oysterman family in Plaquemines. Ferry Weather is organized around the ferry between Connecticut and Fishers Island. The Record’s District is the high ground of a drowned New Orleans, its archive the one building with no windows, “because a window was a way for words to leave.” The recurring image is a person swimming out past where they can touch, or a city kept alive on what the water left.

The landscape is also a moral one. The building that might be watching, the island seen across a sound, and the district governed by bells are all places where people live close together and still can’t see each other. They are the instrument made of brick.

IX. Form: imagined rooms

The most distinctive formal device on the shelf is the invented scene, called Interludes in The Deep End and Rooms in Ferry Weather. In these, the narrator imagines a place he was never in: a board meeting held without him, a producer’s office, the woman’s kitchen.

The device is both an act of empathy and an act of trespass, and the books know it. The Rooms are often the best writing on the shelf. They are lean, specific and generous, freed from the narrator’s voice. But they also claim to know what the narrator can’t know. Ferry Weather names the danger through a priest who warns its narrator, “you’re writing yourself again with her coat on.” The narrators handle the problem by following each invented room with a coda explaining what was built and why. Readers find those codas the least necessary part of the books, and the Rooms themselves among the most moving.

The device suits the shelf’s central question. If no one can truly see another person, then imagination is the only way into another person’s room, and it is always partly a fiction. The books are at their best when they let the imagined room stand without explanation, and so let the reader decide how much of it is true.

X. What remains unresolved

The growth is least complete in the book closest to the author’s own life.

The Deep End ends by treating the manuscript itself as an appeal to the woman at its center. Its narrator frames the book as an application to be with her again, after she has asked for no contact. He flags the problem and goes ahead anyway. That turn is honest about where grief actually was when the book was written, but readers find it the hardest part of the book to sit with, and it weakens the ambiguity the final image depends on.

The contrast with the later fiction is striking. The groundskeeper of Ferry Weather leaves his book unsigned on a library shelf rather than on her step. The Record’s heroine keeps the most important truth out of the record entirely. The fiction has learned to leave its women alone. The autofiction is still writing toward one. That tension isn’t a failure of craft. It’s the mark of a grief that wasn’t finished when the book was. It’s also why The Deep End remains both the rawest book on the shelf and the one readers argue about most.

XI. The work of writing

Taliancich has published at a remarkable pace, with clean prose throughout. The speed tells us something about the role writing plays for him. On the evidence of the books, it is more than a profession. It is how he steadies himself, how he works through experience, and how he stays in conversation with the world when other conversations have closed. One of his narrators is told by the woman he loves that he is “very creative,” and that he should write it all down. The whole shelf can be read as an answer to that instruction.

The cold readers’ most consistent note is a craft note: the books gain most when given time between drafting and release. Every book that has been revised against careful readings has risen. The trilogy, cut by a quarter, is now among the strongest work on the shelf. The habits readers name, such as ending several times, explaining a scene after it lands, and giving the supporting cast one aphoristic voice, are habits of speed, not of ability.

XII. Conclusion

What these novels reveal is a careful, self-critical and deeply feeling sensibility, marked by the experience of being misunderstood. They show a mind that trusts evidence, keeps the record, and turns its sharpest scrutiny on itself. They show an understanding of grief as an empty room still wired for its occupant, and of delusion as grief’s attempt to give that room an author. And they show a conviction that the gravest harm one person can do another is to speak for them, and the greatest kindness is to ask.

Above all, the books show movement. The first novel looks out from a window at a woman it can’t reach. The later ones turn around, book by book, until the story is told from the other side by the person being watched. It’s the arc of a writer learning in public what it means to truly see someone, and finding that seeing, unlike measuring, begins with leaving room for what can’t be known.

The Deep End ends with its narrator swimming out past where he can touch. The books that follow are what he found there.