Family of origin

Review by Booklist Review

Hauser's glorious second novel, following The From-Aways (2014), explores the complicated lives of Elsa and Nolan Grey, half-siblings who are dealing with the recent death of their father, Ian. They reunite after years apart to retrieve Ian's belongings, hoping to discover why he gave up a prestigious academic career to move to an isolated community on Leap Island, off the Gulf Coast, to become a Reversalist. This cultish, much-mocked collective of fringe scientists forensically study the undowny bufflehead, a species of duck that Reversalists claim is becoming less adapted to its surroundings. This seemingly insignificant and deeply questionable observation is why they fervently claim that evolution is reversing. Nolan employs alternating chapters that shift between Elsa and Nolan's younger years and their present as they use their time on the island to analyze their past mistakes and future options. Reminiscent of the family explorations of Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff, this tragicomic novel explores climate change, family ties, and the millennial generation's feeling that they have arrived late to the party, that humanity and the environment appear to be declining before their eyes. Full of brilliantly realized characters, Hauser's latest is profound, often incredibly funny, and captures the times like few other contemporary novels.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hauser (The From-Aways) impresses with her wistful contemporary tale of family bonds and misplaced pessimism. Estranged half-siblings 35-year-old Elsa-a discouraged second-grade teacher in Minnesota-and 29-year-old Nolan-a social media manager for the San Francisco Giants-travel to Leap's Island, a private island off the Gulf Coast, to investigate the drowning death of their father, Ian Grey. Ian, once a respected biologist, had come to Leap's Island to join the Reversalists, a small group of researchers who believe evolution is regressing to make each generation worse. The eccentric inhabitants jealously guard their research on the island's unique duck species, hoping to be the first to prove the theory. Elsa is convinced Ian committed suicide, but Nolan hopes conversations with the researchers will prove her wrong. The pair fall into old patterns of sibling rivalry, and Elsa wrestles with her drastic reaction to learning what caused the family's rupture 15 years before. Hauser intercuts the siblings' investigation with flashbacks to their fractured earlier family life and the melancholic backstories explaining each of the Reversalists' reason for coming to the island. This shimmering take on grief and family will enthrall fans of character-driven stories with its bevy of dashed dreams and cluttered emotions. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Poor Elsa Grey. Late twentysomething, newly separated from her boyfriend, and not exactly happy, she's at least far enough away from her problematic father, mother, and younger half brother Nolan--a source of pain and confusion for most of her life--to make a go of it. That all changes when she receives a phone call informing her that her father, an accomplished scientist, has drowned off the shore of a small Gulf Coast island. There, he had been doing research with a group called the Reverse Darwinists, a small, eccentric team of researchers who believe that evolution is now running in reverse. Elsa is having trouble moving beyond regrets and family issues from childhood, but she must face them now as she travels to the island with Nolan to find out what happened. Although the novel starts out slowly, it deepens and expands once we get to spend more time with Elsa in the core middle section. Hauser (The From-Aways) effectively handles Elsa's emotionally complicated reckoning with herself and her family, charting Elsa's journey through these dark waters with skill and insight. VERDICT A strong psychological profile of a deeply human character; recommended for fans of complex female protagonists, psychological family dramas, and literary fiction.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

In the wake of their father's death, two half siblings confront their pasts and try to rewrite their futures.Hauser (The From-Aways, 2014) returns with a strange and heartbreaking novel about what it means to be a family. When their estranged father, Dr. Ian Grey, drowns while conducting research, adult half siblings Elsa and Nolan Grey are brought together for the first time in years. Ian, along with other peculiar scientists and researchers, lived on Leap's Island in the Gulf of Mexico, where he studied the undowny bufflehead, a duck species that seems to be evolving backwards. Before his death, Ian had become obsessed with one duck, Duck Number Twelve or the Paradise Duck, which he described as "a freak among its peers." Traveling to Leap's Island, the half siblings hope to gather Ian's possessions and find answers to their lingering questions. Elsa believes Ian committed suicide, but Nolan is adamant he didn't. They both wonder if their own failures, inadequacies, and mistakes caused their father to withdraw from the world. Elsa and Nolan must also grapple with their fraught relationshipfull of taboos, secrets, and abandonment issues. Playing with time, memory, and point of view, the novel is structurally ambitious, though sometimes to its own detriment. Its strongest parts are its ruminations on the Grey family dynamics, so the portraits of the islanders feel expendable. Hauser's ability to render the complexities of family relationships with radical honesty is a feat. When Elsa thinks back on her childhood, Hauser writes, "her father had been taken from her over and over again, and Elsa was tired of coming up with new ways to suffer in his absence." A lesser writer would not be able to deliver the disturbing and weird with the grace that Hauser does.A unique, poignant, and slightly taboo novel about family, biology, and evolution. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

The Landing   People came to Watch Landing to forget things. They gave themselves over to its Gulf Coast fug, its boardwalk amble, its funnel-cake smell, its open-carry vodka, its fireworks every night in order to forget, because they were on vacation.   This was the summer people came to the Landing to forget their jobs, forget climate change, forget police brutality, forget opioids, forget refugees, forget their inboxes, forget white supremacists, forget tsunamis out of season, and forget forget forget anyone who took it upon themselves to remind them of these things.   The Greys did not belong here.   Elsa and Nolan Grey might have been happier if they could be forgetful, or dead, but they were not. The Greys remembered everything.   They were fondlers of old grudges and conjurers of childhood Band-Aid smells. They were rescripters of ancient fights and relitigators of the past. They were scab-pickers and dead-horse-beaters and wallowers of the first order.   The Greys had not seen each other in almost three years, but they would converge at Watch Landing because their father was dead, drowned off the coast of Leap's Island, an hour's boat ride south, and as much as they would like to forget Dr. Ian Grey, they could not.   The first sign the Greys did not belong here was that, on the bus bound for Watch Landing, Elsa was the only one not dressed for the beach.   Two girls in front of her, smelling of coconut oil, wore bikini bottoms and t-shirts and hugged collapsible beach chairs. Elsa wore green pants turned up at the cuffs and Teva sandals. Her legs itched hotly. A giant backpack rode in the seat next to her and Elsa looped her arm around it like a conspirator. The bus turned onto the bridge to the peninsula. Once she got to the Landing, there was still the matter of finding someone with a boat to take them to Leap's. Nolan, Elsa's brother, who was meeting her there, claimed this would not be difficult, but it didn't seem likely the island got many visitors, because the people who lived there were all crazy.   Elsa and Nolan's father, Dr. Ian Grey, had moved to Leap's after being humiliated at nearly every distinguished biology department on the West Coast and then losing a fellowship in Alabama. Ian's fall from grace had been going on for so long that his children thought he might never stop falling. But he had, two years ago, when he'd joined the Reversalist movement and gone to live on Leap's Island for good.   Leap's was owned by Mitchell Townes and was inhabited by seven former scientists, researchers, and naturalists whom Townes had convinced of his theories and brought to live there, free of charge. The scientists' work was dedicated to the world's smallest known sea duck, the undowny bufflehead, and the island was the species' only known nesting ground. The undowny bufflehead's existence comprised the sum total evidence of the Reversalists' core belief: that evolution had begun to run backward.   Elsa had learned all this on the Reversalists' vague though well-maintained webpage. According to a counter at the bottom of the site, she was not alone. More than ten thousand people had been interested enough in the Reversalists' theories to scroll through their manifesto. Elsa puzzled over the Reversalists' logo: the silhouette of a bearded man with a walking stick, his foot extended behind him, as if taking a step back. A caption referred to the logo as the "Darwin Walking Backward."   It seemed unlikely to Elsa that her father had believed in any of this.   And yet, by the time Ian Grey had drowned, his rumpled clothes found among pouches of seaweed in one of the island coves the past week, her father had been living with the Reversalists for almost two years, which implied that, despite thirty years at Stanford, Cal Poly, and Berkeley, Ian did believe that human progress had slowed and swung on its fulcrum. He believed that evolution had reversed its course. And he believed all this because of some fucking ducks.   The bus slowed to its final stop at the Landing and everyone got off.   The pavement was cracked. The beach-going people scattered to the ramps over the dunes, to the liquor stores, to the snack shacks and t-shirt shops, and Elsa followed them.   She was a woman whose sweat smelled of iron, and already Elsa was sweating.   She hitched her thumbs in her pack straps. Her sandy hair was roped and piled on her head, and she wore a white tank top that did not cover her soft, curved midriff. Elsa's mother, Ingrid, was a milk-pale Scandinavian nurse with very few bad moods. Elsa had inherited her paleness and little else.   There were many bars, because Watch Landing was the kind of boardwalk where people came to get drunk and stare at the ocean. No one was swimming. There were shrimp shacks and burger joints and a more formal restaurant with a long deck full of tables with white cloths, and of course this was where Elsa found Nolan.   There was a knot between Elsa's shoulders that twisted taut when she saw him. Nolan's mother, Keiko, a microbiome researcher from Kyoto, had been beautiful, and Nolan's sleek hair and open, inquisitive face were his mother's. The rest was all Grey.   Nolan's hair was to his shoulders, and he'd pushed it back with a pair of sunglasses. His long legs were jacked out from the low deck chair, and he leaned over the table as he sucked from the head cavity of a crawfish. A glass of pale beer on the table was only a quarter drunk, beaded around the rim. He wore a blue oxford, open at the neck, and linen pants. In front of him was a bowl of carcasses. He looked so much like their father that Elsa paused. She'd not seen Ian since he moved to Leap's, and Nolan on the boardwalk approximated a reincarnation.   This is mourning? Elsa called.   Nolan looked up. He stood respectfully, like a subordinate officer. His eyes were reddish and the bridge of his nose was dented from the glasses. She wanted to grab his elegant Adam's-appled throat and squeeze. Weakness in Nolan had always driven her mad. Ever since he was small and needily sucking up all of Ian's time.   Elsa drew close. Nolan's fingers in the four o'clock light were oily and spotted with red; he held them out as she embraced him, so as not to stain her clothes. He kissed her cheek, and was it possible she felt the sting of cayenne?   We're not mourning yet, are we? Nolan asked, as if he really wanted to know. As if he would not believe their father was dead unless Elsa said it was so. This pleased Elsa, and yet, why should it be up to her? They were thirty-five and twenty-nine years old, too old for this. Elsa's life was a litany of troubles caused by the various absences of Ian Grey. Why should death be any different? Probably, the ghost of Ian Grey was off plunging his big-knuckled fingers into the layers of a duck's eiderdown and squinting at whatever inscrutable thing he found there--oblivious that his disappearance had inconvenienced anyone at all.   Even this, even death, Ian would not make simple.   No mourning yet, Elsa told Nolan. She set her pack down as the waiter appeared and convinced her that a sweet, red slurry called a zombie was just the thing for a day like today. Elsa agreed. She ordered fried oysters and two sides of fries, because otherwise, she knew, Nolan would eat most of hers and she'd have to be angry at him, because she was hungry and wanted to eat them all without sharing, and there was no time for them to be angry with each other now. Excerpted from Family of Origin: A Novel by C. J. Hauser All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---