Back Home Again
The story begins in a hotel or motel, where the narrator, a twenty-something only child, has had a disturbing dream involving his or her mother. The novel, introduced by this scene and ending with what follows it, consists otherwise in a long analepsis narrating the memories disquieting the narrator’s sleep, events which started at the age of eleven or thirteen. The setting is New York in the early 21st century, or a fictional city, seemingly later that century, that resembles New York, and the narrator’s and his or her mother’s place in it is among wealthy people, though they are not themselves wealthy. The father is at least initially absent, and the mother will be in jeopardy, or even die, caught in an incident that kills others and is in the news. The narrator, nearly isolated, will find a new friend and accomplice of the same age, a child who is intrepid and assertive whereas the narrator is cautious and curious. Another friend will be a middle-aged man, an eccentric hobbyist with a vintage wardrobe, who will kindly take in the narrator. An object having great sentimental value, even a kind of supernatural power, will unbeknownst to the narrator be stolen by the friend and used for a major plot purpose, and the discovery of its absence will be one of the late twists.
This description applies both to Téa Obreht’s new novel The Morningside, and The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer winner from 2013. I join Obreht’s watchful narrator in feeling as if I have “seen something I shouldn’t.” This may be mostly because I read The Goldfinch only last year whereas most readers of The Morningside will only remember patches, ten years on, of Tartt’s tale. The resemblances were at the very least a little distracting, but I hasten to add that where the two novels overlap they are participating in a subgenre, the literary fairy tale with an urban setting, a bit of violence, and, in The Morningside’s case, magical realism. Sauntering around the bookstore tables, you will find other entries, novels that might well be pushed with the marketing phrase “for the young and the young at heart,” although it is the old that is enchanted in these fictions: for Tartt’s Theo, a Fabritius painting and restored furniture, and for Obreht’s Silvia, her aunt’s folkloric tales of the old country, which everyone just calls “Back Home.”
The narrator, Silvia, and her mother—war refugees—have come to Island City courtesy of the federal Repopulation Program, which promises them a townhouse in the city in exchange for their living and working in the old “upper-city” neighborhood called Battle Hill, in a luxury tower called the Morningside. Much of the city is flooded, and the soil base under the Morningside is slowly giving way. Silvia’s aunt Ena, their host, emigrated years before and is the superintendent. Also from Back Home are Popovich, who runs the building, and a weird old lady named Bezi Duras who lives in the penthouse, which even Ena has never seen. The mystery that gets the plot moving concerns Bezi’s Cerberean trio of big black hounds, which she takes out for suspiciously long walks. Ena, a believer and a preserver of belief, gives Silvia supernatural explanations which Silvia’s mother repudiates. Snooping around is the only way Silvia can learn anything of what happens up in the penthouse.
Silvia murmurs about “the world beneath the world”; Ena tells the story of a “vila,” a haughty Slavic fairy with terrible powers; Silvia, on an errand to help an ally, May, finds in his old apartment’s fireplace the “little whirlwind that lives in every chimney,” apparently a household sprite. But The Morningside is not a magical experience. For all of her and Silvia’s urgent incantations, Obreht ends up rather disenchanting us with her parade of mundanities: “as far as the eye could see”; “hitched a ride”; “things came to a head”; “that was that”; “the next thing I knew”; “and then it hit me.” There are more of them. The phrase “move through the world” has at least the distinction of belonging to the social justice formulary, rather than the toolbox of the genre novelist, while Obreht’s bizarre turn to the phrase “imagine my surprise when,” in order to set up a minor twist, is mildly camp, which is at least nice for a change. There are early hints of a slightly different voice in archaisms like “midden” and “bade,” but this does not last, probably having seemed like an indulgence. Tartt, like Obreht a taker of much taken verbal paths, also brought a few antiques out of the cabinet before becoming too occupied with her plotting.
And the exigencies of this story are as gods, demanding much of the author and narrator. In case we aren’t sure what’s going on, what mysteries remain to be probed, or what the stakes are, Silvia will roll out a series of up to six questions. These three should do for example’s sake: “What had Ena actually claimed to know? How certain had she actually been of the dogs’ predicament—and did she think it a predicament at all, or just a fact of their existence? Had she said that Bezi Duras had turned the men into dogs?” These are not, properly speaking, rhetorical questions, as their answers are not in themselves implied, but are out there in the narration proper to be picked out. I was reminded of the book club discussion questions that you find at the end of some paperbacks and thought it awfully generous of Obreht to supply them within the text. But then the author, not averse to sentimentality, which for her purposes is the opposite of mystery, occasionally answers her own questions: “Why was I doing this? To honor Ena, of course.” In such moments, and when turning onto the titles of the four “books” into which The Morningside is divided (simply the names of main characters starting with “Ena”), the critical reader is disarmed by ingenuousness, by Silvia’s wish to make her loving tributes, or the author’s affection for her fictional ladies. (And again, this time at the risk of spoiling a respectful mood, The Goldfinch had a similar charm in its love of whomever its hero loved.)
Silvia’s “world beneath the world” is not only making the distinction between natural and supernatural: the post-climate change Island City in which governments lie, war criminals find refuge, and the wealthy break the rules, is at once real and a cover for the realm of old oaths, family bonds, and desperate emotions associated with the homeland. With the slight bathos of the plot’s latter stages, involving a young girl from back home named Mila, a scandal, a disappearance, and an acceleration of narrative time, we are disappointed to discover that Obreht hasn’t quite done enough with the scheme. More appealing than the world beneath the world are the more ambiguous suggestions of worlds within worlds. A digression into the personal history of the former Morningside superintendent, May, explains that a short story developed from a fictional tragedy which used lines from a victim’s work was published in a New Yorker-like magazine called The Islander, and became a scandal after a confrontation with the family of the plagiarized. Meanwhile, Obreht, as she has throughout, nests these stories within the real world with the assurance that she needn’t narrate the tragedy in detail because “You probably remember most of it.” The passage has the pleasing hint of a puzzle. Which things are contained, and which contain the others? Our world would seem to contain The Morningside—as The Morningside contains The Islander—until its narration reaches out of the page and rearranges things.
Beyond this play between fiction and counterfactuality, there are glimpses of another kind of genre dislocation. A little after May’s story, after much business of spying and trading for keys, Silvia tries to get into Bezi Duras’ penthouse using the private elevator, but the doors open to the startling prospect of a rooftop garden, “a warm veil of silence, disturbed only by the wind and the soft rustle of short twisted trees that stretched away in unbroken rows toward the penthouse, the pale little temple at the far end of the roof.” The bit of rus in urbe is Bezi Duras’ lucky, happy perch in what seems to be pretty scarce times, and the sudden break in the setting suggests that she lives in a different world, almost a different story. This is a metro- and cosmopolitan novel that dreams of an unnamed, largely undefined old country, some version of Obreht’s former Yugoslavia, but it’s really yearning for any country setting at all. (Silvia, as a young woman, will go west.) Out sleuthing with Mila on a balmy night in the next book, Silvia has a comforting look at the moon, which “sat between the darkened buildings, as though it were actually in the city with us.” All these tricks of perspective which fit the natural into the built world, and the fictional into the real—had Obreht committed to them more than to her magical and folkloric substrate—would have been more diverting than what we get in The Morningside. An irony ensues, as she’d actually still be writing a world beneath another world, a subsubgenre: an urban literary fairytale with some postmodern instability. Once upon a time, things were never so simple.
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in The Adroit Journal, Cleveland Review of Books, The Oxonian Review, and Chicago Review of Books. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.
