4 minute read
THE FURROWS by Namwali Serpell
the furrows
women, map physical spaces, focus on characters’ bodies and gestures, and inventory objects. All this detail, however, is the opposite of grounding: instead, it creates a profound feeling of dislocation and disconnection, one of the collection’s themes. In “YYYY,” the narrator prides himself on being observant but fails to see the important things—like his companion’s tears. Another character notes that while objects can “tether us,” they also “can be meaningless garbage.” While some of the longer stories feel wandering, Scodellaro’s shorter ones often land with striking intensity. “Cabbage, The Highest Arch” paints an incisive portrait of a woman in two pages, while “The Foot of the Tan Building” contemplates our indifference to tragedy by examining the body of a woman who jumped to her death, “her running shoes exposed, her childlike ankles exposed,” and “Forty-Seven Days Ago” uses a grocery list’s worth of liquids—“vegetable broth, apple cider vinegar, low sodium soy sauce, extra virgin olive oil…”—to evoke the narrator’s heartbrokenness.
Singular stories that will reward patient readers.
THE FURROWS An Elegy
Serpell, Namwali Hogarth (288 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 27, 2022 978-0-593-44891-5
A woman reckons with her brother’s loss in ways that blur reality and memory. Serpell’s brilliant second novel—following The Old Drift (2019)—is initially narrated by Cassandra Williams, who recalls being 12 and trying to save her 7-year-old brother, Wayne, from drowning off the shore of a Delaware beach. Did Wayne die after she hauled him to the beach and then blacked out, or did he disappear? Her recollection is fuzzy, as is her entire identity. As the narrative progresses, Cassandra’s mind moves forward, as she works for the missing children foundation her mother founded, and back, as she recalls the trauma that consumed her parents and herself. But more engrossingly, her mind also moves sideways, reprocessing and rewriting the moment in various ways. (Perhaps Wayne was struck by a car instead?) The second half of the novel is dedicated to the question of Wayne’s possible survival, and the storytelling is engrossing on the plot level, featuring terrorist attacks, homelessness, identity theft, racial code-switching (Cassandra’s mother is White and her father, Black), seduction—all of which Serpell is expert at capturing. But each drama she describes also speaks to the trauma Cassandra suffers, which makes the novel engrossing on a psychological level as well. It opens questions of how we define ourselves after loss, how broken families find closure, and the multiple painful emotions that spring out of the process. “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt,” Cassandra says in the novel’s first line, and repeatedly after, and Serpell means it. Rather than telling the story straight, the elliptical narrative keeps revisiting the wounds that a tragedy won’t stop delivering. If The Old Drift was an epic effort to outdo Marquez and Rushdie, this slippery yet admirably controlled novel aspires to outdo Toni Morrison, and it earns the comparison. It’s deeply worthy of rereading and debate.
Stylistically refreshing and emotionally intense, cementing Serpell’s place among the best writers going.
SIGNAL FIRES
Shapiro, Dani Knopf (240 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 18, 2022 978-0-593-53472-4
Two families in suburban New York weather crisscrossing births and deaths, losses and rebounds. Shapiro, who made a splash with her gripping genealogy memoir, Inheritance (2019), returns to fiction with this moody, meditative novel, her 11th book. The story opens in 1985. Fifteen-year-old Theo Wilf is driving the family car; his older sister, Sarah, riding shotgun, has been drinking; their friend in the back seat is killed in a wreck right in front of their house. To protect her brother, Sarah claims she was at the wheel. Surprisingly, considering it gets our attention with this super-plotty device, the book is actually more concerned with character development and metaphysical questions than event-driven storytelling. To understand the effects of the tragedy on the siblings, their parents, and the universe, we are guided by an omniscient narrator to moments in 2010, 1999, 2020, 2014, and 1970; Sarah becomes a screenwriter with addiction problems; Theo, a tortured master chef. The book’s anti-chronological structure reflects the yearning, felt by both the characters and their rather insistent narrator, toward the epiphanic idea that everything is connected; nothing and no one is ever truly lost. Across the street from the Wilfs are the Shenkmans—and it’s a good thing for them, since paterfamilias Dr. Wilf will deliver baby Waldo, premature and wrapped in his cord, on the kitchen floor on New Year’s Eve of Y2K. Theo and Waldo will share a lifelong connection; at 9, Waldo will show him an app he loves that charts constellations and geography. This app becomes a literal bridge between the loneliness of modern suburban living and the book’s dream of connectivity. “The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.”
