You will argue with me, as your husband has, that you were all getting along just fine without me. Raising up your corn and wheat and losing your children to heatstroke. But before me, there was no aguaje where a traveler could water his horses. Before me there was no stage route, no postmaster, no sheriff, no stock association. There was nobody in Flagstaff gave a good goddamn about bringing the law to this place. People rustling cattle and people falling down cliffs and calling both an accident. Before me, we were all the way inland.
Turns out, I love a literary Western (Blood Meridian, The Sisters Brothers, Days Without End), and following on the heels of Téa Obreht's breakout success with The Tiger's Wife in 2011, I was surprised to discover that her newest release, Inland, is set in the American Frontier; surprised, I suppose, because as Obreht was born in Croatia (and set her first book there), the tropes and language of a Western might not have been 100% ingrained in her. But not to worry: from the stunning landscape writing to the natural, easy dialogue, Obreht captures time and place delightfully; and as an immigrant herself, she unfolds an incisive story in which all the characters are immigrants – either from abroad or those making the trek inland, from the Atlantic states to the Territories. Not to get political, but in a day where American citizens can be told to go back where they came from if they don't love America the way it is right now, this book is a well-timed reminder that, other than the Indigenous peoples (whom Obreht rightly identifies as tragic victims of Manifest Destiny), everyone who moved to the Frontier was an immigrant to a new land, hoping to wrestle its realities into submission to their own desires. There are the requisite saloon fights and standoffs and bronco busting – and also ghosts and visions and mysterious beasts; these make the book feel like familiar Obreht territory – and despite the fascinating and emotional plot to which they all contribute, the details serve a higher literary purpose as well. I'd say I loved this one. [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.] I will endeavor to keep this spoiler-free, because the details are so surprising.
They were all moving past each other, the mother, and the little girl, and the old man, too – and it struck me, after all these years of seeing the dead, as I stood there holding your bridle and with your breath in my hair, that I had never seen more than one at a time, and had never realized: they were unaware of each others' presence. Suddenly, the gruesome way they had fallen seemed the least mournful thing about this place. They could see the living, but not one another. Nameless and unburied, turned out suddenly into that darkness, they rose to find themselves entirely alone.Inland alternates between two narrators; one timeline covering decades and the other just one day. In the first, Lurie and his father are Balkan immigrants (Lurie doesn't remember his homeland and his father died not long after they arrived in [presumably?] NYC, so that history is lost to him, and us), and after the boy was orphaned, he had many adventures (inside and outside the law), the recounting of which gives a fascinating overview of the Wild West and those who attempted to tame it. Lurie also sees ghosts, and their aching desires can feel more emotionally touching than the quotidian harms that a living body is subject to.
Through three sons and seventeen years of motherhood, shaving had borne out as the only successful campaign against lice, but its effects were decidedly punitive – Toby looked like a deserter from some urchin militia, sentenced to bear the badge of his dishonor. What if, this time, history should fail him, leaving him bald forever? He made a sorry little man as it was: too thin for seven, soft and golden and clewed-up with doubt. Prone to his father's wilding turn of mind.The second narrator is Nora: a weather-beaten, hard-working homesteader who is left on a drought-dry ranch in the Arizona Territories to tend to her family while her husband has gone off to find the overdue water merchant. Down to only cups of water in their home, Nora is left alone to deal with a young son who's afraid of monsters, a ditzy and delicate ward who communes with the dead, a stroke-struck mother-in-law who sneers from her corner, two teenaged sons who have stormed off in anger, and a squabble between neighbours that threatens the survival of their ranch; all while parched and isolated and worried about what's taking her husband so long.
Man is only man. And God, in His infinite wisdom, made it so that to live, generally, is to wound another. And He made every man blind to his own weapons, and too short-living to do anything but guard jealously his own small, wasted way. And thus we go on.Both timelines are taut with mysteries that take the entire narrative to unravel; both timelines have their ghosts; and both deal with the prejudices faced by immigrants – whether they be “limey carpetbaggers”, “small hirsute Levantines”, bird-boned blonds with “Doric foreheads”, or those Mexican nationals who suddenly found their homes on the foreign side of the border when it was moved south to the Rio Grande. There are soldiers triumphant in their massacre of entire Native families, agents from the Land Office trying to harass widows off their land, kingly cattlemen, and miners with unlucky claims; this is a true Western. Touching and intense, with a fitting and fantastical collision of timelines, I found that the ending redeemed a third quarter slump, and I'm left to chew over whether to round a 4.5 up or down. Up it is to five stars because I'm just that sorry to have ended this read.
