For Edwidge Danticat, words are more than the building blocks of stories, pegs on which to hang meaning. Danticat is a writer who seems keenly conscious of the power of words. Through them, the writer creates a world, names reality, and shapes it. Words, in Danticat's hands, are life.

I suppose that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say about a writer, since all we have to trade in is words. Yet in the headlong rush of world-construction and story-craft, prose writers can lose their attention to sentences and specifics. We get lost in the big picture, wrangling our narrative threads and taming them so they do our bidding, so they settle down and play nicely together.

Danticat, by contrast, exhibits a poet's attention to language. In her newest novel, Claire of the Sea Light, one gets the sense that she has gently traversed her sentences many times, turning each phrase over like a pearly, scalloped shell, arranging and rearranging them in careful rows. The result is marvelous, enviable from the start:

The morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a freak wave, measuring between ten and twelve feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose. Claire's father, Nozias, a fisherman, was one of many who saw it in the distance as he walked toward his sloop. He first heard a low rumbling, like that of distant thunder, then saw a wall of water rise from the depths of the ocean, a giant blue-green tongue, trying, it seemed, to lick a pink sky.

Just as quickly as it had swelled, the wave cracked. Its barrel collapsed, pummeling a cutter called Fifine, sinking it and Caleb, the sole fisherman onboard.

Danticat's talent doesn't stop at the sentence level, though: she can also handle the big narrative threads, making books that hook the reader and don't let go. Critics and readers alike praise her fiction and nonfiction (both her novel Krik? Krak! and her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, were nominated for the National Book Award, and her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was an Oprah's Book Club selection). Danticat was born and raised first in Haiti by an aunt and uncle until she was twelve, and then in Brooklyn by her own parents. English is her third language, behind Krey"l and French, which makes her limpid prose all the more remarkable.

Claire of the Sea Light explores the interlocking relationships in a small Haitian fishing village where death, disease, gang-fighting, and poverty exist alongside love and longing and heartbreak. The titular Claire is a child, Claire Limyè Lanmè, born to a dirt-poor fisherman, Nozias, and his beloved in the village of Ville Rose. Her mother—also named Claire—dies on the day of the baby's birth, which means the day is always a reminder to Nozias of what he has gained and lost. The child was named by her mother, but Nozias loves the name, and on the day he realizes he must give the child away so that she can grow up in a home that can provide for her, he pleads with the fabric vendor who is taking her in, "You will not change her name?"

Names are important in this community, where life can come and go so quickly that people may disappear from memory without a name for those who loved them to repeat. To name someone is an act of love, something that situates the named in the world, as Nozias knows:

He called her "wife," my wife, madanm mwen, when it should be really "woman," except he didn't like the words "fanm mwen." "My woman" sounded illicit to him, like a mistress. They were never officially married.

Claire's life is not just about her life, though; it intersects with Gaëlle Cadet Lavaud, the town fabric vendor, whose husband long ago missed the birth of her own daughter because of a gang shooting at Radio Zòrèy, a shooting that killed Bernard Dorien, whose death haunts Max Ardin, Junior, son of the most powerful man in town …

It's a story that recalls the unofficial theme of the HBO drama The Wire: "Everything matters." In The Wire, this means that every choice, every institution, and every person is part of the living organism that is the city of Baltimore—from high-level politicians to young boys on the streetcorner hustling drugs to the failed cop making a go of it as a math teacher. The interactions between these people and the institutions in which they are embedded are often intricate and surprising, and they come together to form and affect the fabric of a society.

Similarly, Danticat's world of Ville Rose is made up of journalists, violent leaders, children, merchants, and fishermen. They are people who have affairs and teach children and fight brutally and haul in the daily catch and hurt their friends and love their families. And the ways they live—the small choices they make—ripple out beyond their reach. Each story matters, a theme that is underlined in the novel by the appearance of Louise George's radio program Di Mwen (Creole for "tell me"), on which ordinary people tell their stories for the entire village to hear, and the world beyond, too. They tell their own stories in order to make them matter, sometimes as an act of bravery and defiance.

In her introduction to the The Best American Essays 2011, Danticat discussed that very impulse:

Through recent experiences with both birth and death, I have discovered that we enter and leave life as, among other things, words. Though we might later become daughters and sons, many of us start out as whispers or rumors before ending up with our names scrawled next to our parents' on birth certificates. We also struggle to find, both throughout our lives and at the end, words to pin down how we see and talk about ourselves.

The characters in Claire of the Sea Light are, in some ways, the fictional crystallization of this: they enter and leave life as words on the page. Yet Danticat does not seem to force them to do her bidding. They do not "stand" for something. Rather than making her characters types in service of a statement, she lets them breathe. They are individuals, people with souls and talents and foibles and desire.

And they stay quietly with the reader long after the book is over. In Danticat's worlds, each story matters, and so do the words that tell those stories. Her books remind us that how we talk about each other—how we name and shape worlds—makes all the difference in how we think about each other and live with one another. Words have the power to take life. And to give it, too.

Alissa Wilkinson is assistant professor of English and the humanities at The King's College and chief film critic at Christianity Today magazine.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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