I’m not talking about the wild twists
or clever reframings that’ve distin-
guished some of the year’s buzzier
titles (see sidebar). Inland simply
parallels two character studies that
must, by the laws of good storytell-
ing, intersect. Obreht brilliantly
approaches this inevitability by
weaving it into the fabric of her
haunted setting, where fate can’t
help but grab the steering wheel.
Nora makes up the book’s heart.
Her husband, Emmett, is a failing
newspaperman who hasn’t been
seen in days; he left, supposedly,
to collect water, but their struggling
town of Amargo is enduring a horrid
drought. She can’t say where her
older sons, Rob and Dolan, have gone,
either—the night before, she fought
with them over the family’s dwin-
dling prospects in Amargo, and they
left in a huff. So Nora is left alone,
parched and embittered, to care for
her youngest, Toby, and Emmett’s
teenage relative Josie.
Obreht conjures a bleak, dry pic-
ture of the West in Nora’s anchoring
story, but she finds its wonder in
Lurie’s saga. Orphaned in childhood,
a (literally) fatal mistake puts him
on the run. His first-person sections
are addressed to an unknown entity;
only later do we realize it’s a camel
called Burke— Obreht’s brightest
creation. He is Lurie’s companion
across endless red-rocked land-
scapes. They bond, Lurie hiding and
riding with the United States Camel
Corps. (A real historical thing!) Of
the splendor of their journey, Lurie
asks, “Who would speak of these
things when we were gone?”
All this and I haven’t mentioned
that both Nora and Lurie talk to
the dead. Nora watches her daughter,
Evelyn, grow up alongside her—
even though Evelyn died as a baby
girl, of heatstroke; they talk, Evelyn
guiding her mother through her
guilt and sadness. Lurie sees ghosts
everywhere he goes; they occupy his
very being. He asks, “Must I now
forever be a vessel, filling up with the
wants of any dead who touched me,
all who’d come before me?” One
ghost gives Lurie a water canteen,
which Lurie never empties—only
fills, “even if it was nearly brimming,
so the water within mixed and
tasted of everything.” The canteen
contains, in other words, lifetimes:
the tattered hopes that brought lon-
ers and communities alike out West,
dreaming of gold but faced with dirt.
Which brings us to the ending.
Evelyn’s spirit draws Lurie to the
Arizona Territory, and he and Burke
eventually wind up in Amargo,
where Nora finds them on their last
legs. Fate—drought, grief, Evelyn—
has brought these souls together,
deep into the night. Lurie’s dying
wish is that his companion finally
“rest.” Nora looks at the pair, man and
beast, and considers his plea with
cosmic empathy. “She feared only
that the camel would have to keep
going,” Obreht writes. “The sorrow of
its suffering journey—what the hell
did she know of its suffering jour-
ney?—rushed into her.” What comes
next? Let’s just say it makes for as
enormously, quietly beautiful a
scene as you’ll encounter in a book.
Nora grabs the tin canteen, pulls
it loose, and hears “the strangest
thing—the singing tumble of water,”
at long last. What Obreht accom-
plishes next is pure poetry. When
Nora sips the water, she really does
see it “all.” Time and memory col-
lapse into each other. Nora tastes the
journeys of Lurie and Burke and
so many others. She senses her family
leaving Amargo, finally with nothing
left, but Evelyn and Emmett still
follow her—present, but not. She
mourns her old Amargo house,
“where they had lived once, and yes,
been happy.” There’s something
deeply devastating about this con-
clusion, embedded as it is with the
tragic reality of its dusty milieu—the
death, the heartbreak, the broken
promises—and yet there is Nora, a
hard woman as ever, loving and los-
ing. She will fight another day. ASHE WANTED TO BE
HERE ALWAYS.
SHE WANTED NEVER
TO BE HERE AGAIN.”
ON NORA, IN THE FINAL INLAND CHAPTER
Do the Twist:
Fiction That Flips
A TRIO OF LAUDED 2019 NOVELS
FORSAKE THE IDEA THAT WILD
PLOT REVEALS ARE MEANT ONLY
FOR MYSTERIES. BY LEAH GREENBLATTNorman Bates. Keyser Söze. “I see dead
people.” On screen, at least, we live for
unreliable narrators, the ice-bath thrill
of an upending plot twist. But in literary
fiction? With a few notable exceptions—
Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby,
young Briony in Atonement—we tend,
logically or not, to impose our own
presumptions of honesty. In a post-truth
world, though, is it any wonder that
some of 2019’s most acclaimed novels
turn on the kind of narrative bombshells
more associated with stories involving
stabby butlers or slippery Girls? (You
know them well: Gone, Dragon Tat tooed,
drunk On the Train.)
Like Téa Obreht’s Inland (see opposite
page), Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel
Boys offers almost immediate intimacy,
but conceals its own secrets, too.
His tale—creative in the details, but
based in grim fact—of a Florida reform
school notorious for its brutal treat-
ment of young boys finds hope and
humanity within the terrible trauma of
the boys’ experiences, and an affect-
ing, understated grace note in the left-
field reveal of its final pages (one
you won’t find in the news exposés or
history books). Susan Choi’s Trust
Exercise, a hothouse portrait of drama
students in thrall to both themselves
and a charismatic teacher, takes
its risks much earlier on, in an abrupt
perspective swerve that calls into
question nearly every claimed truth that
preceded it. And the late turn in Taffy
Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trou-
ble transforms a blithe, man-centered
comedy into a surprisingly affecting
work of stealth feminism. Maybe
Choi puts it best in Trust: “Thoughts are
often false. A feeling’s always real.
Not true, just real.”