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Familiaris

Review by Alden Mudge

It has been 16 years since David Wroblewski published his bestselling first novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. An elemental tale of family strife in Wisconsin’s north woods, Edgar Sawtelle charmed readers with its depiction of the effort of multiple generations to create a magnificent breed of dog that was both companionable and wise. The novel garnered rave reviews in national publications, was an Oprah pick and has been called a modern day classic.

Wroblewski’s second novel, Familiaris, shares many of the characteristics—positive and less so—of his first. The new novel leaps back two generations to tell the story of John Sawtelle, who, with his wife Mary and the men he manages to cajole into his enterprises, develops the first generations of the amazingly sensitive dogs.

We meet John in 1919 when he is about to get fired from his job at the Kissel Automotive Company in Hartford, Wisconsin (an actual manufacturer). Recently married to Mary, John has found a farm for sale near the town of Mellen on a puppy-related excursion north. John is a self-designated efficiency expert, with a love of detail he puts to use throughout his life as a dog breeder. After being fired in dramatic fashion, he convinces his pal Elbow, a master tinkerer and woodworker, and his frenemy Frank, an addicted, wounded veteran, to join Mary and him in pursuing his next big idea on the new farm.

The rest of Familiaris unfolds over 980 pages, sometimes with storm and thunder. There is, for example, an electrifying depiction of an epic forest fire in Wisconsin (an actual event) that involves the birth and survival of Ida, a magical sprite who intervenes at crucial points in the tale. In other passages, the story feels becalmed, drifting on a light jocular tone until the wind again rises. In the lulls, questions arise. Would Mary really be so jaunty as the lone woman amid all the angst and testosterone of the early years in Mellen? Why do the couples’ sons drop into the story from nowhere as fully formed high school graduates?

Though at times there seems to be something missing, prompting one to wonder if a future volume will reveal more, the energy Wroblewski draws from his love of the landscape and history of Wisconsin, his birth state, transmutes into enough high voltage narrative and inventiveness to keep readers with him through flatter moments.

David Wroblewski’s second novel, Familiaris, leaps back two generations from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle to follow John Sawtelle and his wife Mary as they develop the first generations of an amazingly sensitive breed of dogs.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

For Claire Messud, all the world’s a stage

Interview by Alden Mudge

In The Burning Girl and The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud mesmerized readers with her psychologically astute character portrayals. This Strange Eventful History, her much anticipated sixth novel, draws from the stories of generations of Messud’s own French Algerian family and their reckoning with their position in colonial history.

“I’d been preparing all my life to write this book”: Read our starred review of This Strange Eventful History.

While This Strange Eventful History is a work of fiction, in the afterword, you note that your characters’ “movements hew closely to those of [your] own family.” Would you say more about the process of composing a novel inspired by your family history? Was your experience writing this book different from previous novels?

This novel is more ambitious in scale than anything I’d attempted previously—it spans seven decades and five continents. The places that the characters live at various times in the novel aren’t random—they’re the places where members of my family lived, at the times in which they lived there. The novel is shaped, then, by basic facts; and in some cases by historical incidents. I did a lot of research, in particular for the first half of the book—a good bit involving family documents, but also lots of plain old historical research.

The novel follows three generations of the Cassar family, beginning in Algeria as its colonizer France fell to the Nazis in 1940 and ending in Connecticut in 2010. What impelled you to explore this longer arc of family history?

In his retirement, my devoutly Catholic French grandfather wrote for my sister and me a family memoir about the years before and during the Second World War (covering 1928-1946). He called it “Everything that we believed in”—because he wanted to try to convey to us, his granddaughters, whose secular North American upbringing was so far from his own, what their lives had been like. I’ve realized, over the past decade or so, that the world in which I grew up—the world of the late 20th century, shaped by the postwar years that preceded it—has vanished. In order to explain to people of my kids’ age what it was like—what we believed in, and what our parents believed in—I needed to write a novel that began with the Second World War. Because that cataclysm, of course, determined everything that followed.

Would you tell us about your choice of the novel’s title?

The title is a line from near the end of Jaques’ famous soliloquy, “All the world’s a stage,” in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion; / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The novel is framed around François’ life—from the age of almost 9 until his death, over seven decades (“and one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages”). I chose the title both because it refers to that speech (which is reflected in the novel’s form) and because the shape of François’ life, and of the lives of his family members, are, to me at least, strange and eventful, without being grand or important.

“In order to explain to people of my kids’ age what [the world in which I grew up] was like—what we believed in, and what our parents believed in—I needed to write a novel that began with the Second World War.”

The Cassars’ unhappiness seems to be linked both to a scandalous secret and to being out of sync with history writ large. In your view, what is the relationship of your characters’ lives to larger forces of history?

The Cassars’ unhappiness both is and isn’t linked to a scandalous secret; each member of the family has their own relation to that secret, and for some it’s not unhappy at all—quite the opposite, indeed! I hoped to convey that events are simply themselves, and how we understand them makes all the difference. If you’re devoutly religious, for example, something will look a certain way, and if you’re not, it looks different. The same of course goes for any of our beliefs.

The family is perhaps not so much out of sync with history as simply at the mercy of it. In this case, the family are French colonials in Algeria, and must make their lives elsewhere when Algerian independence comes. Again, each family member has a different reaction to that situation: Gaston and Lucienne put their faith in God, as he says, “like the birds on the breeze”; François creates a life far from France and never speaks of the past; while Denise shapes her life’s narrative around what she experiences as loss. This, I think, reflects the broader reality that each of us is always at the mercy of history’s great events—consider our lives just in the past few years, my goodness!—and that the only thing we have any control over (and sometimes precious little control at that) is how we understand and contend with our challenges.

Uprooted by war and the collapse of French colonialism, the Cassars move frequently, from Algeria to Massachusetts to Argentina, Australia, Canada and France. Your depictions of these places are vivid and precise. What kind of research did you do in composing the novel? How much arises from memory and how much from invention?

I did a lot of research—and I was fortunate to have a lot of help. This is the first time in my life that I’ve worked with research assistants. Over the many years that I worked on the novel, several amazing people helped me discover all kinds of things: political and military history about France, World War II and Algeria, but also what Amherst College was like in the early 1950s; what CEI, the business school outside Geneva, and its environs looked like; and about the man who ran it from the beginning—a great idealist. I’m very grateful to these brilliant helpers. I read lots of published books, of course, as well as my grandfather’s memoir (which is close to 1500 pages handwritten) and many family letters, spanning decades. For example, while I don’t have any letters my dad wrote when studying at Amherst, I have all the letters that his family wrote to him from Algeria. It was an amazing experience to unfold the onionskin sheets and know that nobody had read these pages since my dad tore open each letter, probably while walking out of the campus post office, back in 1953, and then stuffed them back in the envelope—reading them, time collapsed.

Chloe, the youngest Cassar, is the only character to narrate in the first person. From childhood, Chloe sees herself as a guardian to her family and a storyteller. She is curious, sometimes to the point of being nosy. She aspires to be a writer. Do you feel a particular kinship with Chloe?

Yes, I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to a certain kinship with the character of Chloe—of course, that’s partly why her sections are in the first person. But they’re also in the first person because the understanding is that she’s the speaker in the prologue, and that she’s writing the book, as it were. I wanted the novel to reflect in some way her evolution, along with the narrative’s, from more traditional third person storytelling to increasing interiority and subjectivity. Hopefully that’s something the reader can feel in the changing rhythms of the prose as well as in the voice.

“Events are simply themselves, and how we understand them makes all the difference.”

Your novel contains some of the most beautiful sentences I have recently read. They are long, elaborate, stately and often inward-dwelling in a way that feels deliberate. Could you tell us about your choice of sentence structure?

Thank you so much—I’m so glad you liked the sentences. I don’t know that it’s so much a choice as almost a sense that the sentences come through me—I hear them in my head, their rhythms, like music. I can feel when a word is off, or the syntax. I have an innate feeling of the shape of a sentence—of each sentence, and of how they sit together as well as each on its own. For me that’s a big part of what writing is—the music of the language, interwoven with meaning. They’re inseparable.

At what point do you share drafts of your work in progress, and with whom?

Historically I’ve shared work earlier, but this time around, I simply had my head down, mostly. I’d written about 100 pages over several years and couldn’t find the space to do it properly while teaching full time, so I took an unpaid leave to write the rest of the book. That meant I had a bit less than eight months and no time to loiter. I write by hand, on graph paper, pretty small, and nobody can really read my manuscripts, or not without effort. So I had to type it into the computer before anyone could read anything. My husband is my first reader, and eventually he read parts of it, and then ultimately the whole thing. Luckily for me, we know each other well at this point; he’s great at being a cheerleader at the right moments, and then offering real criticism when that’s what’s called for.

What were the biggest challenges and satisfactions of writing This Strange Eventful History?

That’s a good question—I think they are linked, in fact. As I mentioned, the scale of this novel is bigger than anything I’d written before; finding a form that would enable me to take on such a long stretch of history, while still exploring the characters’ interiority and while not having the book collapse under its own weight—that was for me a central challenge. I can honestly say that I’d been preparing all my life to write this book, and I couldn’t have managed it earlier, for all sorts of reasons. So there’s real satisfaction simply in having got the book written, at last!

Claire Messud author photo © Lucian Wood.

The acclaimed author's latest family saga follows the French Algerian Cassars, who find themselves bit players in the global shifts following WWII.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Whale Fall

Review by Freya Sachs

A dead whale is a harbinger of transformation in this mesmerizing coming-of-age story.

It’s 1938. Eighteen-year-old Manod lives on a remote island in the British Isles that is situated five to 10 hours from the mainland by boat, depending on the weather. Here, nature dictates how bountiful or brutal life will be for the isolated island community that lives off the land and sea. Men’s desirability is based on their ability to forage seaweed and the value of their livestock, while girls are married by 16 and often left widows by 25, because the sea is dangerous and none of the fishermen can swim.

The dead whale’s appearance is followed, about a month later, by an English couple, Joan and Edward, ethnographers from the mainland who are keen to gather content for a book about the island. Manod, literate in English and Welsh, and hopeful for an escape from social expectations, becomes their eager assistant. But her interactions with the idealistic Joan and the handsome Edward make her reexamine her dreams and her understanding of island life.

Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the community’s transformation. Entrancing descriptions illuminate the raw beauty of the island through seasonal changes. Manod is a memorable protagonist; her ability to live this challenging life while entertaining aspirations for herself and her sister beyond getting married and staying on the island shows great complexity and strength. Manod’s interactions with Joan and Edward are profound in their subtlety, demonstrating the cultural divides possible within the Commonwealth. Debut author Elizabeth O’Connor’s metaphoric use of the decaying whale masterfully depicts the gradual erosion of the island way of life, picked apart by scavengers.

Poignant and poetic, Whale Fall is a compelling read for fans of M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans, Tove Janssen’s The Summer Book and Claire Keegan’s Foster.

Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the transformation of an isolated community in the British Isles.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

This Strange Eventful History

Review by Alden Mudge

Claire Messud’s enthralling sixth work of fiction recounts the wanderings of three generations of the Cassar family over seven decades, from the Nazi occupation of France in June 1940 to the passing of François Cassar in Connecticut in 2010.

This Strange Eventful History opens with 8-year-old François wanting to write to his father in Salonica, Greece, to alert him about the French surrender. His father Gaston, a French naval attaché, has of course heard the sorry news and considers his options with a mixture of doubt, shame and defiance. He longs for his wife Lucienne, who has been and will be to the end of their days his “aIni,” his source. She and their children, François and Denise, have fled to their home in Algeria to wait out the conflict.

The Cassars are French Algerians, pieds-noirs, who have lived in Algeria since its colonization. They feel French, but they are regarded as outsiders in mainland France, especially after the Algerian revolution in 1954. François’ sense of not fitting in is one reason he leaves for America. Gaston, in a new career in the booming oil business, also learns he doesn’t fit in. A colleague tells him, “We lost the war, my friend. . . . To the victor go the spoils. The future is in oil, and the future is in English.” For this family, every success carries a germ of defeat.

But it isn’t only business and geopolitics that stymies the Cassars. Some whiff of family shame or dysfunction leaves François always feeling inadequate and warps his sister Denise into a delusional and increasingly alcoholic spinster, devoted to the care of their aging parents.

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her descriptions of people and places are beautiful, precise and illuminating. Her understanding of the human soul is profound. This is reason enough to read the novel.

Yet the novel’s magic casts a wider spell. Chloe, a third-generation Cassar, is a novelist, like Messud. She wishes to write about and understand her family’s uncomfortable history. She observes, “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.” In This Strange Eventful History, Messud has given us that richer thing. It is amazing.

Read our interview with Claire Messud for This Strange Eventful History.

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her understanding of the human soul is profound.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For her third novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club, Helen Simonson returns to the English seaside, this time in the summer of 1919. The Great War has ended, the flu epidemic has passed and the men have returned. But for Constance Haverhill, the war’s end has brought an end to the work she’d loved: keeping the books for an estate. Now her prospects are uncertain; her mother died of the flu, her brother is pointedly unwelcoming and she’s stuck serving as a companion to the elderly Mrs. Fog at a seaside hotel. 

But soon, Constance’s lonely summer is interrupted by the trouser-wearing, motorcycle-riding Poppy Wirrall and her brother, Harris. The siblings and their mother are staying at the hotel while their grand house is renovated. During the war, Poppy and other young women delivered messages and supplies via motorcycle, and now they’re trying to build a motorcycle taxi business. Harris, a veteran who lost a leg flying bombing missions, is suffering and moody; he wants to fly again, but the world is telling him he can’t. 

The story follows Constance, her new friends and a large cast of secondary characters through the summer, as they struggle to find their way in a culture that’s still shocked by women riding motorcycles, despite all the changes the war brought. Throughout, the novel weaves in issues like racism, jingoism, the repercussions of war and the limitations that class expectations put on women. Which is not to say that this is a heavy novel; the flatly villainous characters who cause trouble—several upper crust Brits and a late-arriving American—add levity to some scenes, although the novel’s tone is generally more introspective, without the comedic punch of Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Readers may wish that the novel spent more time with the Motorcycle Club women and their hopes and efforts and discontents, rather than with subplots that meander away from the motorcycles and aeroplanes of the title. Still, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment when both everything and nothing had changed, along with a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions, romantic entanglements and a bittersweet, fitting ending.

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment, just after WWI, when both everything and nothing had changed for women in England—plus a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions and romantic entanglements.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Long Island

Review by Melissa Brown

A knock at the door can change everything. Such a small, everyday act can have enormous power to set off a chain of events one would never have considered possible.

Long Island by Colm Toibin revisits Eilis Lacey more than 20 years after the events of his 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which introduced readers to this self-possessed, elusive young woman. She now has a daughter and a son who are almost grown, and sends their pictures to her mother in monthly letters. Then, a knock at the door upends Eilis’ marriage to Tony Fiorello. The revelation of his indiscretions drives her back to Enniscorthy, Ireland, to avoid the coming fallout and also to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday. While there, she inevitably crosses paths again with Jim Farrell, the love she left behind all those years before. Jim is still unmarried, though he is secretly courting Eilis’s friend Nancy, who is now a widow. The last time Eilis left Brooklyn for Ireland, after her sister Rose’s death, Tony was so worried she wouldn’t return that they married before she sailed away. Now, Tony must wonder again if she’ll come back to him. As in Brooklyn, Eilis makes her own decisions and thus makes her own life.

A close observer of human nature, Toibin writes with great depth of longing, teasing out even the smallest interactions so that the reader feels the moment’s wistfulness or indecision keenly. No gesture or sigh escapes his notice. Toibin’s dialogue captures a wealth of feeling, but often it is what is unsaid, contained in the pauses, that grips the reader’s attention. We hold our breath as Eilis and Jim and Nancy make their plans and promises. Long Island is purely character driven, which may not thrill readers who prefer a faster pace. In its compelling interiority, though, there is plenty of beauty to savor.

Long Island revisits Eilis Lacey more than 20 years after the events of Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which introduced readers to this self-possessed, elusive young woman.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Glorious Exploits

Review by Thane Tierney

At its heart, Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is something of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let’s-put-on-a-show romp . . . with a few minor, and mind-bending, exceptions. The stars are a pair of foul-mouthed unemployed potters from Syracuse, Sicily, the year is 412 BC and the acting troupe isn’t a bunch of neighborhood kids; it’s composed of Athenian prisoners of war left in a quarry to starve.

The tale’s narrator, Lampo, is a garrulous scoundrel always on the lookout for spare coin. One day, after tossing scraps of food to the Athenian prisoners in exchange for their reciting passages from Euripides, Lampo’s more taciturn friend Gelon presents him with a plan: reinvent themselves as directors, recruit the prisoners as a cast, tart up the prison quarry as their amphitheater and present two of Euripides’ plays, Medea and Trojan Women, back to back.

What could possibly go wrong? Apart, of course, from the fact that the potential audience of Syracusans hates the defeated Athenians, and that the production is to be mounted by two unemployed potters with no background in theater. Nonetheless, the show must go on; the hapless duo happens upon a mysterious benefactor who offers funds for the production, sets are built, costumes are sewn and various potentially hazardous wheels are set in motion.

At the outset of rehearsals, co-director Gelon gives his captive cast a little pep talk. He reminisces about how the Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex sparked his fondness for the theater: “I don’t hate you. How could I? Even though I know you came to make us slaves. I can’t hate you. I believe any city that gave us those plays has something worth saving.”

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then Glorious Exploits reveals that art makes even stranger ones, as the captors and the captives pause their hostilities for the sake of a greater—if imperfect—good. Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in this quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.

Ferdia Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in his debut novel, Glorious Exploits, a quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

James

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Percival Everett brings The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved supporting character, Jim, into the foreground of his new novel, James, a reworking of the Mark Twain classic. Though James stays with Huck Finn’s characters, setting and first-person perspective, it’s Jim, not Huck, who narrates this story. Jim overhears that he’s about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, and, as in the original, he runs, landing on Jackson Island, where he encounters Huck, who’s faked his own death to flee his abusive, alcoholic father. The two set out together, floating down the Mississippi.

James, like Huck Finn, is a picaresque tale, one of improbable adventures and moments of reunion. Jim and Huck encounter the con men the Duke and Dauphin, and though this duo get their comic moments, Everett highlights their quick turn to brutality. Jim and Huck are soon separated, and Jim recounts a series of horrors—Everett pulls no punches in depicting white enslavers’ treatment of enslaved people—leavened with the unexpected connections Jim makes. Unlike in Huck Finn, James’ Jim can read and write, secretly reading books from his enslaver’s library. In a feverish dream encounter after he’s bitten by a snake, Jim debates Voltaire, proponent of liberty and equality, forcing Voltaire to admit to his own racism. All the while, he longs for his wife and daughter, determined to gain his own freedom and theirs.

Everett balances a moral clarity about the atrocities of slavery with a dry, Twainian humor, even turning Twain’s dialect on its head to great effect: In this telling, enslaved people use this stereotypical “slave” dialect only around white people, so as to seem unthreateningly foolish, while laughing about it together in private. On his journey, Jim repeatedly encounters other enslaved people being brutalized by white people, but he’s powerless to intervene; life has taught him that to do so leads to greater violence, and sometimes death. Throughout, the novel’s revelations feel both surprising and convincing, and its explosive, cathartic ending points at the possibility of hope for Jim and his family.

In an era of retellings, James stands out for staying true to Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people. In revealing Jim’s full humanity, deep thinking and love through his hero’s journey, Everett has written a visionary and necessary reimagining.

In an era of retellings, Percival Everett’s James stands out for staying true to Mark Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Village Weavers

Review by Melissa Brown

Sisi and Gertie meet as children in the 1940s. They come from different strata of their Haitian society, where skin color, hairstyle and city of birth can all mark a person’s worth, depending on who is judging. These two fast friends are often confused but not truly bothered by these distinctions until Gertie’s meddling sisters conspire to separate them. Ignorant of significant truths about their families, Sisi and Gertie don’t realize how intertwined they really are. Then their budding connection is suddenly severed, and misunderstandings and mistrust lead to alienation that lasts for decades until life finally draws them back to each other.

Told from both girls’ perspectives, Myriam J.A. Chancy’s Village Weavers homes in on the intricate, nuanced lives of women—as sisters, friends, lovers and mothers. With interjections in French, Spanish and Kreyol throughout, the novel also covers historical ground, incorporating some of the spirituality, art, activism and politics of an island that has been divided between Haitians and Dominicans for centuries. The losses they endure eventually drive Gertie and Sisi away, like migrating birds, from their land and their memories. Against the backdrop of these weighty issues, Village Weavers unfolds somewhat slowly at first but finds a rhythm halfway through, where the pace picks up.

Chancy takes the reader from the 1940s and the World Expo marking Port-au-Prince’s bicentennial through the 1970s, when both women are living in America, and ultimately to 2002, when Sisi and Gertie have both grown old. “Not all sweetness is sweet at first,” and these two women must be willing to “dive into the depths” of what they do not understand to finally heal. Village Weavers is full of vibrancy, wistfulness and even playfulness, capably portraying the enduring tenacity of women in uncertain times. Reading Chancy’s portrayal of Haiti is a memorable experience—rich with contradictions and complexities, visceral and ever-changing.

Village Weavers is full of vibrancy, wistfulness and even playfulness, capably portraying the enduring tenacity of women in uncertain times.
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Our top 10 books for March 2024

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW

Our top 10 books for March 2024

The best new books of the month include highly anticipated follow-ups from Sloane Crosley, Sasha LaPointe and Juan Gómez-Jurado.
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Book jacket image for 49 Days by Agnes Lee

49 Days is an unusual, profoundly moving graphic novel whose elegance belies its complexity and whose emotional impact only grows upon rereading.

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In All That Grows, Jack Wong evokes the soft haze of childhood summers where a small stand of trees might be seen as a huge

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The Antonia Scott series is hands-down the best suspense trilogy to come along since Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

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A lushly crafted tale of a Maine fishing village cursed by a mermaid, The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is a debut to submerge yourself in.

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In Valerie Martin’s captivating Mrs. Gulliver, she lifts the star-crossed dramatics of Romeo and Juliet but eschews tragedy, offering us instead an idyll.

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Natasha Siegel’s beautifully written The Phoenix Bride pushes readers to reconsider what happily ever after looks like.

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Thunder Song is an essay collection full of sensitive meditations and powerful observations from Coast Salish author Sasha LaPointe.

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Book jacket image for The Unclaimed by Pamela Prickett

Gripping and groundbreaking, The Unclaimed investigates the Americans who are abandoned in death and what they tell us about how we treat the living.

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Cristina Henriquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these

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Novelist, essayist, humorist and critic Sloane Crosley shows a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide.

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Notes from an Island

Orlagh Cassidy, Tove Jansson

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Listeners will be immersed in this meditative exploration of time spent in nature—the story of Moomin creator Tove Jansson and her partner Tooti Pietila’s life together on an island off the Gulf of Finland.
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The best new books of the month include highly anticipated follow-ups from Sloane Crosley, Sasha LaPointe and Juan Gómez-Jurado.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Wandering Stars

Review by Michael Magras

“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest. Tommy Orange demonstrates the veracity of that line in Wandering Stars, his follow-up to There There, the 2018 debut novel for which he was a Pulitzer finalist. Few literary debuts are as chillingly of-the-moment as There There, which spanned a huge cast of Native American characters and culminated in a tragedy at an Oakland powwow. Orange further explores the lives of some of those characters in this assured continuation.

Orange pulls off a neat sleight of hand in Wandering Stars: He limits the scope by focusing on only a few characters, yet he also expands his narrative by rewinding to the 19th and early 20th centuries to tell the story of ancestors of the Red Feather family.

The book begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when the U.S. Army attacked Cheyenne and Arapaho people in present-day Colorado. As Orange puts it, “seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons,” and killed hundreds of Native Americans—a prolongation of “America’s longest war.”

One of the survivors was Jude Star, a mute man sent by train as a prisoner of war to a fortress in St. Augustine, Florida. The man the army chose to run the prison was Richard Henry Pratt. Years later, Pratt founded the Carlisle School, to which Native American parents were forced to send their children to be “taught that everything about being Indian was wrong.” Jude’s son, Charles Star, is enrolled there. By the early 1900s, Charles develops an addiction to laudanum and tries to interview an aging Pratt to learn about his father.

The novel then shifts to 2018, when Orvil Red Feather, a survivor of the tragedy in There There, is trying to overcome his injuries and emotional trauma. Like Charles, he turns to drugs, in his case with the help of his friend Sean, whose father sets up a basement lab and starts his own pharmacopeia. He also tries to piece together the story of his Cheyenne family history, although Opal, the great-aunt with whom he and his younger brothers live, isn’t forthcoming about their heritage.

The style of the first part of the book is different from the second, more modern half. If the result feels like two separate books, there’s still much to recommend Wandering Stars, from Orange’s sensitive depiction of Orvil’s path to recovery to the chronicling of important, overlooked moments in the brutal history of America’s treatment of its Indigenous people. As Opal laments, Native Americans have been “consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions.” Wandering Stars is an impassioned censure of that marginalization.

Read Tommy Orange’s essay on the writing of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars sensitively depicts Orvil Red Feather’s path to recovery after the tragedy in There, There, as well as chronicling important, overlooked moments in the history of America’s brutal treatment of its Indigenous people.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Mrs. Gulliver

Review by Alden Mudge

Valerie Martin’s captivating new novel, Mrs. Gulliver, lies just beyond the horizon. The year is 1954. Verona Island floats a longish ferry ride away from the mainland. Lila Gulliver’s clients enter through a side door behind a hedge, unseen from the street, though prostitution is legal on the island.

Lila, who tells this tale, is a keen observer of surfaces. She crisply describes the clothing and demeanor of everyone we meet. Of the two destitute farm girls who arrive in her drawing room one humid day, Carita stands out. She possesses a rich velvet voice and “an archness as well, distant and amused.” Carita has been blind since birth. Lila thinks Carita might just fulfill a fantasy of some of her clients.

We readers, like Lila, her clients, her colleagues and a college boy named Ian, are soon enchanted by Carita. Lila notes that Ian is “a romantic, self-righteous boy, and I liked the idea of him with Carita, two healthy young bodies driven together by sexual attraction and not much else. . . . She would forget him in a month, but he would remember her for the rest of his life.”

Alas, Lila is not quite right. Ian decides he must save Carita from this den of iniquity. (Lila’s house, by the way, is a place where part-time sex worker Mimi describes the economic theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and Carita decides Marx is right.) Ian, scion of the wealthiest family on the island, is involved with a murder that may be a gangland hit. He loses his mind. He and Carita flee to an impoverished fishing village.

Many complications ensue, mostly having to do with money, and the varying temperatures and power dynamics of love. In her afterword, Martin writes that she did not want Carita to end up like Juliet Capulet, a tragic heroine. Instead, in Mrs. Gulliver, Martin offers us an idyll, perhaps even a comedy. Her touch is tender and light. There are shadows and there is sunshine. All’s well that ends well. We hope.

In Mrs. Gulliver, Valerie Martin offers us an idyll, perhaps even a comedy. All’s well that ends well. We hope.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Tommy Orange on the strangeness of novel-writing

Behind the Book by Tommy Orange

Before March of 2018, I never intended to write a sequel to There There. When I first decided to do it, the mean voices inside immediately began judging me. Like it was lowbrow. Like it belonged in the Marvel universe of decision-making, like people would think it was a cash grab even though I made the decision before the success of There There.

The idea first came to me when I was sitting in a Penguin Random House warehouse signing an insane amount of books ahead of the publication of There There. That is not a romantic place for a novel to be conceived. I feel embarrassed to share that it came during that moment, but that is when it came. The sales reps who were helping me to sign all these books played a Spotify radio station based on the song “There There” by Radiohead. “Wandering Star” by Portishead came on and right when I heard it, I knew I wanted to write a sequel and that it would be called Wandering Stars. I didn’t at all know at first where the follow-up novel would lead based on this title, but I knew with strange certainty it would be the title. I could never have guessed all the unexpected places it would lead me.

Some of the earliest writing I did for Wandering Stars was about Maxine Loneman experiencing the death of her grandson. I was on a run in Baltimore, and I thought of Maxine and Tony in the afterlife and then of all these afterlife experiences of the characters from There There. That was the original conception—there was going to be a lot of weird afterlife stuff. And then in early 2019 I was in Sweden for the translation of There There. I almost didn’t go on this trip. I was to go to Italy, Sweden and Amsterdam. I’d traveled so much in 2018 that despite these being really cool sounding places, I didn’t actually want to go.

It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

Just before I was to leave I went to a Lunar New Year festival at the Oakland Museum with my family, and we parked at the Lake Merritt BART parking lot, which is notorious for break-ins. I think I wanted something bad to happen. I even left my backpack in the car. And then it did. Someone stole all of my luggage, my passport and my backpack with my computer in it, plus even my son’s toys and some of my wife’s clothes and jewelry. I was upset but also excited because I thought it meant I wouldn’t have to go to Europe. But my agent insisted I should. And she was right. So I got an emergency rushed new passport and only missed the Italian portion of the trip.

Anyway, so then the organizers in Sweden asked if I wanted a private tour of a museum. They said there was a Cheyenne exhibit. I ended up getting this really weird meta-tour where the person leading me through the museum kept explaining that they knew the museum shouldn’t have all this stuff and that they were trying to find ways to return it but weren’t entirely sure how yet. It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

When we came to the Cheyenne exhibit I looked at old regalia and felt that familiar sadness I feel at museums, wondering about why anyone thought showing stolen stuff directly related to colonialism was a good idea, when I caught sight of a newspaper article clipping that said “Southern Cheyennes in Florida, 1875.” I know enough about my tribe’s history to know we were never in Florida. Not as a people. When I came home from the trip, I ended up falling deeply down a rabbit hole researching why some of us were in St. Augustine, Florida, from 1875 to 1878, at a prison-castle called Fort Marion that was shaped like a star. St. Augustine was also the very first European settlement in the continental United States. It should be noted, and some know, but many do not, that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, not in North America. His discovery of the United States is just as false and meaningless as his legacy as some kind of hero. He went home in chains and will always be remembered by people who know the history as an awful human being.

But how would I connect this piece of history with the aftermath of the powwow from There There?

It was in the research that the moment happened. This was maybe six months after Sweden and first finding out about Fort Marion. I’d been reading a book called War Dance at Fort Marion by Brad D. Lookingbill. I was immersing myself in the world of Fort Marion and beginning to write what would become the beginning of Wandering Stars. I got to the end of the book and it listed the names of the prisoners. The character I had already started writing I’d named Star. And there in the list of names was a Southern Cheyenne named Star, and not far below him, someone named Bear Shield. I immediately started crying seeing the names. That I had already written a character named Star was one thing, but to see a family name from There There was just so overwhelming. I became convinced at that moment that I would make a generational tie between one of the prisoners at Fort Marion and one of the families who survived the shooting at the powwow at the end of There There.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing.

I have found in writing these two novels that there are things that go into the work, and also things that come out of it. For instance, the spider legs that Orvil Red Feather pulls out of his leg in There There, that was something that actually happened to me. In a West Oakland Target bathroom, just like Orvil. And then the week after I wrote the bat scene from the Thomas Frank chapter in There There, we had a bat fly into our house. The bat did what they call a flyby on my wife and niece. It felt so related to the bat I wrote into the novel and my wife definitely blamed me writing it in for what happened. And then my wife’s medical insurance had lapsed without our knowing and we ended up having to spend $10,000 to pay for rabies shots. One of the first things we did with advance money from There There was to pay that medical bill.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing. You have to be open to what it can become, I think. You have to open yourself up to what might be possible for it to become that you might never have imagined. It can be a kind of collaboration with your unconscious, and with something else. The process, I guess. It can feel like it takes everything you have. And it does.

Read our review of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange author photo by Michael Lionstar.

The author shares the moments from his life that became part of the story of his hit debut, There There, and the song that inspired his sequel’s title, Wandering Stars.

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