Women like reading about other women going away. Preferably far away, preferably quite alone. We read Frances Mayles’ “Under the Tuscan Sun,” or the memoirs of Jane Goodall or the novels of Harriet Doerr. Every year there comes another anthology of writing from solo female adventurers: I drank yak butter tea, alone; I gazed at Balinese rice paddies, alone; I visited Antarctica alone, alone, alone.

Alison Anderson has written a novel about a woman who is deliciously alone in a place that is as far away as can be imagined. Fran is a research biologist living on Egret Island, a tiny laboratory of a landmass just off Mauritius. In flight from a failed marriage back in Berkeley, she is passionately, maybe fanatically working to save a dying species: “Egret has been designated a nature reserve by the Mauritian government; Fran is the field worker charged by an independent foundation with returning the island to its prehuman condition. She will replace the exotic with the endemic; she will restore birds and small reptiles to their natural habitat. And she will try to save the mourner-bird from extinction.”

If you’re catching a whiff of David Quammen’s nonfiction opus “The Song of the Dodo,” you’re not far off. Anderson has claimed Quammen as a major inspiration.

Fran acknowledges that she’s playing God with this experiment in reverse evolution, and with her monomaniacal vision, her inflexible standards and her short patience with the foibles of human social life, she’s peculiarly well suited to the role of all-controlling deity. At the opening of the book, she’s hunkered down on the island with a new assistant, a former Red Cross delegate by the name of Christian. Her beloved former assistant, Satish, has died mysteriously, and so far she’s unimpressed with his replacement.

Christian, meanwhile, has ghosts of his own. His pregnant girlfriend has disappeared in Bosnia; unable to find her, he’s come to work for Fran as a kind of tropical occupational therapy. So here we are on an island, with two lonely, haunted, disappointed people. They eat separately, get drunk separately, reminisce separately. They nurse their guilt and their secrets. In short, they mope.

In the midst of all this high-octane sulking, Fran and Christian manage to breed a female mourner-bird. Someone, though, sabotages their grand experiment, sneaking onto the island by night and unloosing forbidden mongooses, who smash the birds’ eggs. As they try to protect the mourner-birds, Fran and Christian draw closer to each other. They finally confess to each other their respective stories in the midst of a cataclysmic cyclone of events (if you can’t stand the objective correlative, you’ll definitely want to get out of this kitchen).

There’s a lot of emotional bombast here, of a tastefully hushed sort. This is the kind of writing that always gets called “lyrical” on jacket copy. It’s the kind of writing where dialogue is not set off in quotation marks, where the scenes are broken up by lots of spacious white pauses, where Fran, cooking her dinner one evening, thinks to herself, “I am flavoring my solitude. ” Just as high-flown is the moral tone of the book, which can, and does, slip into sanctimony. Here’s Anderson describing Fran’s decidedly un-social social life: “When she first came to the island, the white Anglo community tried to invite her to teas, to cocktail parties. She quickly tired of their talk of material things, of their polite indifference to her work.” Teas! Cocktail parties! Material things! How unspeakably crass.

Still, despite my low-grade irritation with Anderson’s mannerisms, I found myself reluctant to part company with Fran. I wanted to stay there, basking in the company of this brainy, tough-ish dame. Anderson has, in a sense, written the ultimate woman-alone fantasy. Fran has meaningful work, a successful career, a highly developed interior life and devoted young male assistants. This is what alone looks like, when we’re dreaming. The woman has her own island, for crying out loud.

At the end of the novel, we find Fran, alone again, sitting in her old colonial cottage, “her pen poised above a blank page. But she is not writing. She is listening to the sounds of nightfall: the ever-present surf, a dying wind in the trees, the conversation of birds – fodies, mynahs, bulbuls, warning of darkness, urging haste.” Oh, to write idly in a notebook. To listen to the birds. We stop for a moment, imagining ourselves there on the wave-lapped island. And then we shut the book, and argue with the kids, and answer the telephone and get ready for work. •

Claire Dederer is a Seattle writer.