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Summary
Summary
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award * One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year * Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
"A triumph."-- New York Magazine
From one of the most celebrated new voices in American literature, a brilliantly inventive and "enthralling" ( Oprah Daily ) novel about the eternal bonds of family and the mysteries of love and loss--"already earning its author comparisons to Toni Morrison" ( Lit Hub ).
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Time, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Esquire, Vulture, Ms. Magazine, Vox, Mental Floss, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly
I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.
Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother, Wayne, is seven. One day, when they're alone together, there is an accident and Wayne is lost forever. His body is never recovered. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt. Their father leaves, starts another family elsewhere. But their mother can't give up hope and launches an organization dedicated to missing children.
As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in bistros, airplane aisles, subway cars. Here is her brother's face, the light in his eyes, the way he seems to recognize her, too. But it can't be, of course. Or can it? Then one day, in another accident, C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who is also searching for someone and for his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.
Namwali Serpell's remarkable new novel captures the uncanny experience of grief, the way the past breaks over the present like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a story of mistaken identity, double consciousness, and the wishful--and sometimes willful--longing for reunion with those we've lost.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the brilliant and impressionistic latest from Serpell (The Old Drift), a young woman traverses the trenches of grief that have shaped her life. Cassandra's younger brother, Wayne, drowned at the beach when she was 12, and his body was never found. With the steadiness of water seeking its level, Serpell explores the parallel but distinct realities Cassandra and her parents inhabit, leading up to her postcollege years: she's forever in therapy, her mother won't admit Wayne has died, and her father leaves them to start a new life. Whenever Cassandra is asked to retell the story, she can't make sense of it. In a breathtaking maneuver, Serpell resets the novel again and again, cycling through possible accidents that convey Cassandra's shock: Wayne drowns, he's hit by a car, he's thrown from a carousel. Then, Cassandra meets an enigmatic man she seems to know is her brother by the light in his eyes. In a series of shocking twists, Serpell shatters comfortable ideas about grief and melds Cassandra's glittering narrative shards into a searching, unforgettable story. It's a considerable shift from the huge canvas of her previous work, and no less captivating. P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
"I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt," says the protagonist of Serpell's (The Old Drift, 2019) impressive novel, which explores the manifestations and expressions of grief. Cassandra "Cee" Williams was 12 when her seven-year-old brother, Wayne, drowned near their family's Delaware summer house; his body was never found. Because she may have witnessed the tragedy (she blacked out after trying to save him), Cee must recount the exhausting, confusing experience again and again--to her distraught parents, police, and multiple therapists. As an adult, Cee, a mixed-race Black woman, works for the missing children's organization her mother founded in her refusal to accept Wayne's death. Cee's father has remarried. Being inside Cee's head as she imagines glimpsing Wayne in everyday locales can be disorienting, though this effectively evokes the complex mourning process. Then Cee meets a man who takes the plot in a surprising new direction. Employing language in creative ways and upending reader expectations, Serpell continues to expand the possibilities of what literature can accomplish.
Guardian Review
It is the curse and indulgence of every era to think of itself as remarkable: as uniquely burdened and momentous. But the case for the present is strong. "It's as if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening ¿" writes the Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell. "We are all heroes of cataclysm now." If there's an emerging theme to the art of these crisis-racked times, it's time itself: multiverses, parallel lives and wormholes; groundhog days and grandfather paradoxes; time-travellers and their ever-patient wives. From indie films (Everything Everywhere All at Once; Palm Springs), to prestige TV (Russian Doll, Dark), to queer romance novels (see Casey McQuiston's delightful One Last Stop), creators seem intent on mucking with the space-time continuum. Could there be a better metaphor for our perpetual present than an inescapable cosmic loop? The more inevitable the future seems, the more we dream of one that can be averted - of a past that can be undone. In Serpell's new novel The Furrows, time mimics grief - it slurs, skips, loops and folds in on itself. When Cee Williams is 12, her seven-year-old brother, Wayne, dies in her care. She is holding him when he takes his last breath. Something electric passes between the siblings in this dying moment - "his body swept clean of him, mine filled to bursting". The exchange is so intense that Cee passes out. When she wakes, Wayne's body is gone. Serpell's premise is a magnificent snare; you'll be hard-pressed to find a better opening chapter this year. Without flesh-and-blood proof, Cee's mother, Charlotte, refuses to believe (or perhaps to admit) that her son is dead. The media loves an anguished mother, if she is the right sort of mother, and Charlotte is: photogenically bereft, middle-class, white (Wayne and Cee's father is Black). As Charlotte builds herself a charity empire, Cee is dragged from therapist to therapist. "I've been trained my whole life," she explains, "to tell stories to strangers." But Cee's account of her brother's accident is slippery. In one version, Wayne drowns in a riptide at a lonely beach; in others, his little body is tossed from a fairground carousel, or hit by a car. Perhaps none of these stories is true, or perhaps they're all true in some wrenchingly elemental way. "I don't want to tell you what happened," Cee pleads, "I want to tell you how it felt." Is Wayne dying in universe after universe, or just in a cruel loop in Cee's mind? Does it matter? Serpell's prize-winning first novel, The Old Drift, was a rowdy epic - one of those gloriously overstuffed, state-of-the-nation debuts that can be forgiven its narrative sins because it's so abundantly smart. Tracing the fate of four generations of Zambian women, from colonial settlement through to a drone-surveillance future - via the political surreality of Zambia's 1960s space programme - The Old Drift was a collision of magical realism, Afrofuturism and postcolonial picaresque. There are no talking mosquitoes in Serpell's new book, no high-Dickensian oddballs - The Furrows is far more intimate, a novel of skin pressed to skin. Where The Old Drift sparked comparisons to Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, The Furrows feels more akin to Hari Kunzru's White Tears, or Omar El Akkad's What Strange Paradise: a modern parable, or sociopolitical trauma made flesh. Told once, the story of Wayne's accident is a tragedy; but told again and again and again it becomes a kind of elegy, a lament for broken Black bodies, and recurrent horrors. "For us, death is everywhere," Cee's father warns her. "Of course," she replies, "but in the end what does knowing that give you?" In the second half of The Furrows (which is less riveting than the first, but tantalisingly cryptic), Wayne's absence becomes a kind of shapeshifting presence. Decades after losing her brother, Cee will meet a man who shares his name: a seeming doppelganger, who himself feels haunted by some trailing shadow. Cee's attraction to him is as ferocious as it is taboo - "it feels like some deep, atavistic deja vu" - and it forces her to confront the lie she is being groomed to uphold, as she prepares to take on a larger role in her mother's charity. "We've climbed up a couple of rungs on the class ladder, Charlotte and I, propped on Wayne's ghostly back," Cee admits. The Furrows shows how lucrative white guilt and trauma can be. And how easily it can slide into something darker. Charlotte moves through the world like a bruised queen. "She looks regal and wounded," Serpell writes, "grand and tender. But she wears a crown of entitlement." Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence. A room echoes with the "curbed bedlam" of sitcom laughter; commuters ignore each other in the "slotted indifference" of a train carriage. There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable - no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved - only the inescapable rhythms of loss. "It's like swimming," she writes. "You stroke and kick to get to the outermost edge of the wave. You feel the momentum: go on go on go on. But always, something tugs you back into the scooped water, the furrows, those relentless grooves."
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Serpell's (The Old Drift) haunting latest opens as Cassandra Williams remembers when she was 12, at the beach with her seven-year-old brother, Wayne. A sudden storm traps Wayne in the furrows between the waves. Cassandra swims out to rescue him but cannot save him. In the aftermath, her mother refuses to believe that Wayne is dead because there is no body, and despite years of therapy, Cassandra can't let him go either. Cassandra sees Wayne everywhere--she reimagines his death, and even encounters a man with his name. Cassandra is emotionally and physically drawn to this man, who also had a traumatic childhood and has unspoken motives for keeping her on his radar. Narrators Kristen Ariza, Ryan Vincent Anderson, and Dion Graham give voice to Serpell's complex characters, bringing out the fluid and unpredictable nature of time, grief, and love. Ariza narrates the part of Cassandra, while Graham takes over midway through to give voice to Wayne. Anderson narrates the part of a third character who introduces a shocking twist. VERDICT This slippery book twists and turns on itself in beautiful but confounding ways, blurring boundaries between truth and perception, reality and memory. Share with fans of Onyi Nwabineli's Someday, Maybe.--Joanna M. Burkhardt