Staff Picks: Cranberries, Canzones, and Catharsis
Téa Obreht. Photo: Ilan Harel.
Many things will be said about , Téa Obreht’s second novel. I can only hope to settle my tent with the believers. A Western as far as the eye can see, starts with lickins and bounties and ends with them, too, teasing your sense of exploration like you’re home alone with the radio tuned to But this is not ; there are no heroes or, blessedly, “complexly wrought antiheroes.” Instead, reading feels like a rare chance to read about people, history, and myth all at once without any part canceling out the others. The book is a marriage between some sort of Howard Zinn history lesson, E. L. Doctorow at his best, and the kind of murkily beautiful folktale that is so. I stayed up very late with Lurie, an outlaw with an improbable, unforgettable camel companion, and Nora, a homesteader with all the plagues, and felt the deep possibility of the impossible. It is a trick of the light that allows Obreht to introduce the sweet, downy Goatie (“Nobody could prove she was really a goat, and nobody could prove she was really a sheep”) while asking broad questions about American settlement, belonging, race, and undying denial of water scarcity. There are newspaper fights and gunfights and ghosts and romance, and I wish they’d all appeared earlier in the summer so I could tell the world . But in , the past is present and will continue to be so into the fall and the next and the next.
