February 1, 2021
At midlife, Samantha Raymond is dealing with her mother's illness, her teenage daughter's swerve into independence, and the results of the 2016 election. So she buys a house in a weathered part of Syracuse, NY, and moves in, leaving family and suburbs behind. From the perennially award-winning and -nominated author of Stone Arabia.
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Starred review from May 3, 2021
Spiotta (Innocence and Others) draws up a love letter to Syracuse, N.Y., in this wonderfully mischievous and witty story of a 53-year-old woman who flees the suburbs for the city. In 2017, Sam Raymond divides her time between working part-time at a historical house for fictional suffragette and Oneida Community member Claire Loomis, and her “bored-housewife pastime of attending open houses.” After swooning over a run-down bungalow designed by a locally treasured architect, she buys the house and leaves her husband, Matt, and 16-year-old daughter, Ally, without much of an explanation. Matt assumes she’s leaving as part of her distraught reaction to Trump being elected president; it’s true that Sam’s outrage has peaked, and she’s been going to meetings with other enraged women, which Spiotta renders with ingenious complexity. When a pair of younger women confronts a gathering of older white feminists (“All I know is that people our age, queer people, people of color—we didn’t elect him,” one of the young women says), Sam’s reaction is mixed, as she feels caught between two generations. Sam then meets a self-described “Half Hobo” from an online “Crones” group, who advises Sam to resign herself to the coming apocalypse. But Sam still wants her life to have meaning, and she wants to reconnect with Ally, whose story of a secret affair with a 29-year-old man emerges in a parallel narrative. As Sam reckons with how Syracuse’s history is viewed by a younger generation (“let’s salvage, not savage”), Spiotta pulls off a surprising dive into the Loomis story, which informs Sam’s relationship with her own mother and with Ally while shading in Sam’s interest in local lore. This is a knockout.
May 15, 2021
A woman pursuing a midlife reset finds her received notions about domesticity and justice unraveling. In her previous smart, spiky novels, Spiotta explored the tenuous bonds between brothers and sisters (Stone Arabia, 2011) and female friends (Innocents and Others, 2016). Here the themes are motherhood and marriage, as Sam, a 50-something woman, attempts to reboot her life after Trump's election. The protest groups she joins on Facebook are contentious (one is called "Hardcore Hags, Harridans, and Harpies"), which she at first finds inspirational. On an impulse, she leaves her marriage and buys a dilapidated historic house in Syracuse. But she still needs her husband's financial support (she works part time in the historic home of a "problematic" 19th-century feminist), and the infighting among her activist friends soon becomes confounding. (She's strong-armed into signing a petition censuring one woman for unexplained transgressions.) Lost in the shuffle is Sam's ailing mother as well as Ally, her 16-year-old daughter, who's an academic high achiever seduced by her 29-year-old mentor in an entrepreneurship program. Sam processes all this in irrational, woman-on-the-brink ways (keying a truck, a disastrous turn at a stand-up open mic) that are typical in domestic-crisis novels. But Spiotta's characterization of Sam is more complicated and slippery, as she begins to recognize that the entrapment she feels is as much a function of broader forces she's helpless to control; shifting between Sam's and Ally's perspectives, Spiotta asks how much leeway a mother has in a society in which patriarchal attitudes carry so much weight. A violent act at the tail end of the novel both clarifies and complicates the predicament, and Spiotta artfully contextualizes Sam's existential crisis as part of her hometown's history. As Sam asks, for herself, and everybody: "What happened to us? When did progress become so ugly?" An engrossing, interior mother-daughter story that expands into a sharp social commentary.
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