★ 01/02/2023
Critic Row’s magisterial latest (after the essay collection White Flights) traces the complex dynamics of a New York City family on a geopolitical scale. In 2000, Wilcox patriarch Sandy, a lawyer, narrowly avoids disbarment after unwittingly aiding a client of fraud. A year later, his wife, Naomi, a geophysicist at Columbia University, reveals that her biological father was Black. Then, in 2003, their youngest child, Bering, is fatally shot by an Israeli Defense Force sniper while protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestine’s West Bank. After Bering’s death, her oldest brother, Patrick, goes to Nepal to become a monk. Sandy and Naomi’s marriage, meanwhile, has been faltering since the late 1970s, when they founded a Zen monastery in Vermont, and following a failed suicide attempt a decade after Bering’s death, Sandy leaves Naomi and retreats to Vermont, where he takes a vow of silence. Middle child Winter, a 20-something immigration lawyer, is marrying Zeno, an undocumented citizen, and wants nothing more than the family to be together at their wedding. Winter and Naomi also butt heads, big time, on race (Naomi insists they’re white; Winter identifies as multiracial). As the Wilcoxes reckon with the limits of what they can bear, Winter’s request proves tough to meet. Moments of levity draw the reader in (Sandy on shaving his head: “I look like Mr. Clean, he thinks, allowing himself one glimpse in the mirror, or Yul Brynner”), and the author pulls off many moving metafictional moments (Sandy, again, sensing the text of Row’s novel: “He feels it embrace him, one animal embracing another; it smells like wet fur”). This is Row’s best work yet. (Mar.)
Richly imagined, reflexively neurotic and frequently quite dazzling.” — New York Times Book Review
“Row’s magisterial latest (after the essay collection White Flights) traces the complex dynamics of a New York City family on a geopolitical scale. . . . Moments of levity draw the reader in . . . and the author pulls off many moving metafictional moments. . . . This is Row’s best work yet.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Stupendously good…. Like Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), this is a family saga with a global perspective, sweeping across borders and time, from Israel to Chiapas to the northeastern U.S., from the utopian communes of the 1970s to the present, and exploring the impending climate disaster, colonialism, race, identity, and wealth, along with some metafictional musing. Each character’s story is a fascinating portal into contemporary life, adding up to a deeply moving, wonderfully engaging, and truly remarkable novel of the times.” — Booklist
“Jess Row interrogated American whiteness with great creative power in Your Face in Mine and White Flights. The New Earth extends his thinking on historical amnesia and erasure, race and family, in extraordinary ways.” — Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
"Riveting and brilliant, The New Earth throws down a gauntlet around Jewishness, diaspora, and the historical production of whiteness in America with such tremendous force that the novel feels epochal. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the American literary landscape will be quite the same after the effects of this work are felt. A novel at once sprawling and deeply intimate, I had to stop reading many times simply to marvel at Row’s creation of this family and the book that holds them." — Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“[A] deeply ambitious, genre-defying work, which hops back and forth in time, shifts between various points of view, and incorporates a massive amount of politics and theory on race, Zen Buddhism, climate change, the history of Israel and Palestine, and, among other things, the novel itself as a literary form.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A rich, rollicking novel about a dysfunctional Jewish clan from the Upper West Side and the 2003 West Bank tragedy that derailed them. . . Row] gracefully balances multiple registers to craft a reader’s delight. . . . Row retains a deep affection for his cast, arguably more than they deserve. He breathes wondrous life into them. Their neuroses — so many neuroses — click into place. Each character’s thoughts scamper like mice through mazes, a science experiment gone wrong, and yet the data they yield bolsters a tale that’s both experimental and Balzacian, lighthearted and dead serious." — Washington Post
Jim Meskimen takes the pivotal role of the narrator in this dazzling audiobook with a thoughtful tone and sure-handed style. Among an exceptionally talented cast, Robin Miles captures the angsty brilliance of matriarch Naomi; she smoothly performs the character's contradictory combination of self-delusion and self-awareness. Jason Culp portrays her estranged husband, the suicidal Sandy, with eloquent restraint. The children in this Manhattan-based shattered family--Patrick, Winter, and Bering--are voiced evocatively by Josh Bloomberg, Inés del Castillo, and Jaime Lamchick. Each gives these heady, flawed yet compelling characters individuality and grace. A work of metafiction, this novel breaks down the fourth wall as the complex plot moves forward. The many voices in this timely audiobook present a fascinating portrait of a family in distress. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Jim Meskimen takes the pivotal role of the narrator in this dazzling audiobook with a thoughtful tone and sure-handed style. Among an exceptionally talented cast, Robin Miles captures the angsty brilliance of matriarch Naomi; she smoothly performs the character's contradictory combination of self-delusion and self-awareness. Jason Culp portrays her estranged husband, the suicidal Sandy, with eloquent restraint. The children in this Manhattan-based shattered family--Patrick, Winter, and Bering--are voiced evocatively by Josh Bloomberg, Inés del Castillo, and Jaime Lamchick. Each gives these heady, flawed yet compelling characters individuality and grace. A work of metafiction, this novel breaks down the fourth wall as the complex plot moves forward. The many voices in this timely audiobook present a fascinating portrait of a family in distress. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
★ 2023-03-14
A New York Jewish family confronts its catastrophic past.
In his latest novel, Row introduces us to the Wilcox family, a sprawling, dysfunctional group traumatized, in various ways, by several key moments in their past. When their mother, Naomi, informs them that her biological father had been Black, Patrick and his sisters, Winter and Bering, are horrified that she's been keeping that secret for so long. Bering winds up traveling to Palestine as a peace activist, where she's killed by an Israeli sniper. Winter becomes an immigration attorney; Patrick flees to Germany after a stint as a Buddhist monk. To reel off these plot details, however, is to give a poor impression of Row’s deeply ambitious, genre-defying work, which hops back and forth in time, shifts between various points of view, and incorporates a massive amount of politics and theory on race, Zen Buddhism, climate change, the history of Israel and Palestine, and, among other things, the novel itself as a literary form. This is not a novel to be devoured in one gulp. “This family has never had a coherent story to tell about itself,” Winter says one night. “Like an egg cracked over a pan,” Row writes, “the story spreads until it stops. It finds its boundaries by exhausting its materials.” Much of the novel is told via dialogue: This is a book of discourse, in every sense of the word, and its happenings are told rather than shown. Characters speak to each other or to themselves at immense length, and we have access to their emails and texts. If the books seems overstuffed to the point of being overdetermined—one storyline involves the Zapatista uprising, for example—it’s a testament to Row’s talent to say that, somehow, he manages to tie it all together.
A deeply ambitious saga that takes on many of the thorniest questions of 21st-century American life.
