The furrows A novel

Namwali Serpell, 1980-

Book - 2022

"Cassandra Williams is twelve, and her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they're alone together, an accident happens and Wayne is lost forever. Or so it seems. Though his body is never recovered, their mother, unable to give up hope, launches an organization dedicated to missing children. Their father simply leaves, starts another family somewhere else. As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in coffee shops, airplane aisles, subways cars, cities on either coast. Here is her brother's older face, the light in his eyes, his lanky limbs, the way he seems to recognize her too. But it can't be, of course. Or can it? Disaster strikes again and C meets a man both mysterious and strangely familiar, a man w...ho is also searching for someone, as well as his own place in the world. His name is Wayne"--

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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Detective and mystery fiction
Novels
Published
London ; New York : Hogarth [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Namwali Serpell, 1980- (author)
Edition
First Edition
Physical Description
270 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9780593448915
9781781090848
9781781090855
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

"I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt," says the protagonist of Serpell's (The Old Drift, 2019) impressive novel, which explores the manifestations and expressions of grief. Cassandra "Cee" Williams was 12 when her seven-year-old brother, Wayne, drowned near their family's Delaware summer house; his body was never found. Because she may have witnessed the tragedy (she blacked out after trying to save him), Cee must recount the exhausting, confusing experience again and again--to her distraught parents, police, and multiple therapists. As an adult, Cee, a mixed-race Black woman, works for the missing children's organization her mother founded in her refusal to accept Wayne's death. Cee's father has remarried. Being inside Cee's head as she imagines glimpsing Wayne in everyday locales can be disorienting, though this effectively evokes the complex mourning process. Then Cee meets a man who takes the plot in a surprising new direction. Employing language in creative ways and upending reader expectations, Serpell continues to expand the possibilities of what literature can accomplish.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In the brilliant and impressionistic latest from Serpell (The Old Drift), a young woman traverses the trenches of grief that have shaped her life. Cassandra's younger brother, Wayne, drowned at the beach when she was 12, and his body was never found. With the steadiness of water seeking its level, Serpell explores the parallel but distinct realities Cassandra and her parents inhabit, leading up to her postcollege years: she's forever in therapy, her mother won't admit Wayne has died, and her father leaves them to start a new life. Whenever Cassandra is asked to retell the story, she can't make sense of it. In a breathtaking maneuver, Serpell resets the novel again and again, cycling through possible accidents that convey Cassandra's shock: Wayne drowns, he's hit by a car, he's thrown from a carousel. Then, Cassandra meets an enigmatic man she seems to know is her brother by the light in his eyes. In a series of shocking twists, Serpell shatters comfortable ideas about grief and melds Cassandra's glittering narrative shards into a searching, unforgettable story. It's a considerable shift from the huge canvas of her previous work, and no less captivating. P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Serpell's (The Old Drift) haunting latest opens as Cassandra Williams remembers when she was 12, at the beach with her seven-year-old brother, Wayne. A sudden storm traps Wayne in the furrows between the waves. Cassandra swims out to rescue him but cannot save him. In the aftermath, her mother refuses to believe that Wayne is dead because there is no body, and despite years of therapy, Cassandra can't let him go either. Cassandra sees Wayne everywhere--she reimagines his death, and even encounters a man with his name. Cassandra is emotionally and physically drawn to this man, who also had a traumatic childhood and has unspoken motives for keeping her on his radar. Narrators Kristen Ariza, Ryan Vincent Anderson, and Dion Graham give voice to Serpell's complex characters, bringing out the fluid and unpredictable nature of time, grief, and love. Ariza narrates the part of Cassandra, while Graham takes over midway through to give voice to Wayne. Anderson narrates the part of a third character who introduces a shocking twist. VERDICT This slippery book twists and turns on itself in beautiful but confounding ways, blurring boundaries between truth and perception, reality and memory. Share with fans of Onyi Nwabineli's Someday, Maybe.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

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

A woman reckons with her brother's loss in ways that blur reality and memory. Serpell's brilliant second novel--following The Old Drift (2019)--is initially narrated by Cassandra Williams, who recalls being 12 and trying to save her 7-year-old brother, Wayne, from drowning off the shore of a Delaware beach. Did Wayne die after she hauled him to the beach and then blacked out, or did he disappear? Her recollection is fuzzy, as is her entire identity. As the narrative progresses, Cassandra's mind moves forward, as she works for the missing children foundation her mother founded, and back, as she recalls the trauma that consumed her parents and herself. But more engrossingly, her mind also moves sideways, reprocessing and rewriting the moment in various ways. (Perhaps Wayne was struck by a car instead?) The second half of the novel is dedicated to the question of Wayne's possible survival, and the storytelling is engrossing on the plot level, featuring terrorist attacks, homelessness, identity theft, racial code-switching (Cassandra's mother is White and her father, Black), seduction--all of which Serpell is expert at capturing. But each drama she describes also speaks to the trauma Cassandra suffers, which makes the novel engrossing on a psychological level as well. It opens questions of how we define ourselves after loss, how broken families find closure, and the multiple painful emotions that spring out of the process. "I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt," Cassandra says in the novel's first line, and repeatedly after, and Serpell means it. Rather than telling the story straight, the elliptical narrative keeps revisiting the wounds that a tragedy won't stop delivering. If The Old Drift was an epic effort to outdo Marquez and Rushdie, this slippery yet admirably controlled novel aspires to outdo Toni Morrison, and it earns the comparison. It's deeply worthy of rereading and debate. Stylistically refreshing and emotionally intense, cementing Serpell's place among the best writers going. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1 ≈≈≈ I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt. When I was twelve, my little brother drowned. He was seven. I was with him. I swam him to shore. His arms were wrapped around my neck from behind, his chest on my back, his knees pummeling my thighs. At first, his small heavy head was on my shoulder, and he breathed in my ear, the occasional snort when water came in. His head bounced. My shoulder ached. His hands were knotted at my collarbone and I held them there with my hand, both so that he wouldn't let go and so that he wouldn't choke me. With my other hand, I pushed the water away. We had gone to the beach for the day, just the two of us, alone together. This was allowed. This was our whole summer. Our family lived in Baltimore, or in the suburbs really, a place called Pikesville. When June came and set us free from school, and set my father free from his job teaching chemical engineering at Catonsville Community College--­my mother was a painter, so she was always free--­we would drive three hours down to Delaware, to a town near Bethany Beach, where every year we rented the same narrow gray house with a skew porch out front. Every morning, after breakfast and cartoons, my brother and I would leave our father to edit his articles and our mother to dab at her paintings. Wayne and I would change into our still-­damp swimsuits and I would pack us Capri Suns and Lunchables from the fridge. We would walk along the roads, cutting through a gap between the fancier houses to reach the beach. My mother had told us that the gap was called No Man's Land, which Wayne misheard and took to mean it belonged to a man named Norman. We'd sneak quietly through Norman's Land, then tromp over the boardwalk, our flipflops knocking against it, and find our favorite spot on the shore, which was marked by clumps of sea grass. Wayne was a nutty brown, a scrawny creature, a good kid. He played so hard, as if play were work. I was too old to play, so I watched him play, and helped sometimes. That day, I buried him for fun's sake. We dug a shallow trench with cupped hands, like dogs, like gardeners. The topsand was cane sugar, the undersand brown sugar. When the trench was big enough, he tumbled into it and I packed the sand onto his body, patpatting it over his hands and over his bony knees. Under the fluorescent sun, he lay still as a magician's assistant. He asked me to cover his head with our straw hat and I said, "No, you'll suffocate!" He flinched, as if to grab for it himself, then remembered that his hand was buried. Too late: the mound of sand over it had sprouted a crack. He glanced at it, at me. I patpatted the sand back flat. After a moment he said it again, he mouthed, Cover. My. Head. I touched my sandy finger to his sandy cheek. "Close your eyes, Wayne," I said, and placed the straw hat over his squinching face. I had stolen that hat from a fruit vendor before Wayne was born, when he was still in the womb. Our mother, pregnant and craving, was buying a pear at a stand at a farmers' market. The hat was rolling at the fruit vendor's feet like tumbleweed. It beckoned me and so I picked it up and put it behind my back, switching it quickly to my front when we turned to leave. My mother didn't notice until a block later. She twisted my earlobe till it stung and hissed, "It's too late to give it back now, you little twit!" Although our family had owned the straw hat for many years now, it was still too big for either of us kids to wear. We used it for carrying things instead, its leather chinstrap serving as a handle. We had used it today to bring lunch and a towel. Now it swallowed his head completely. "You're a dead Mexican," I giggled. "Olé!" he muffled from under the hat. "I mean cowboy," I said. "Ahoy!" "That's a sailor." There was a pause. "Yeehaw!" he said. I didn't answer. I didn't laugh. I walked away from his buried body, staggered off into the sand pockets toward the greenish sea, bored but deeply satisfied that he would be surprised to find me gone when he lifted that dumb hat off his face. My turn to trick him for once. My toes were already wet by the time he realized I was gone. He leapt up and tossed the hat and gangled his way toward me. Yelling pellmell, splummeshing past me into the water. I watched his bronze back vanish, then retreated and sat beside the empty trench with my arms around my knees. There was no one else around. It was bright and hot, the end of summer. Then the clouds came and lowered. The wind rose. The waves rose. ≈ Dear Wayne. You swam into the furrows. At first, you didn't know it because you were under the surface and you faced down as you swam, staring at the vault of the sea below. Then you felt the sky darken above you, a shadow passing, and when you came up to breathe, you were suddenly inside them, the great grooves in the water, the furrows. On either side of you, those whirring sheets of water, the foam along their edges sharpening like teeth. On either side of you, the furrows chewing, cleaving deeper. They ate you up. You were alone out there and the world took you back in, reclaimed you into its endless folding. ≈ He was joyful and swimming and then he wasn't. I ran in. I swam to him. I reached him and we grappled some until he managed to get on my back and wrap his arms around my neck. I held his knuckles in my hand. I turned and swam us to shore. He dragged me back. Halfway to the beach, his small heavy head began to beat against my shoulder in an unreasonable way. That was the word I thought: unreasonable. A word our father would say. I knew to hold my breath and dive through the waves like our mother had taught us. But what about Wayne? Did he remember to dive, to hold his breath? There was no breath in me to ask or remind him. The wind whipped. I clutched his knuckles like a junk of bones in one hand, pushed the water away with the other. We rocked, his knees bumping the back of me, his head knocking my shoulder in that unreasonable way. It made no sound, but they found bruises later. I felt him soften and something inside him came into me then--­ssth, ssth, ssth--­came into me in little waves. More and more ripples until it was done and my insides felt full up--­his body swept clean of him, mine filled to bursting. I swam like this, doubled, an emptied sack on my back, my fingers raw with clutching. I woke up on the beach alone, on my back, sputtering, my throat raw. I turned my head and puked, mostly lacy water. Puking didn't hurt; it was a comfort. Water sucked at my feet, intermittent, insistent. I was confused about exactly how naked I was; my swimsuit was tangled in the crevices of my body. There was seaweed stringing my arms, and the grit of sand and salt disturbed my sense of my skin, its limits, where it began and ended. Exhaustion crowded me, from the top of my head all the way down my back. Pain, the throbbing in my head and my shoulder, made me rise onto my elbows and look around. Everything was blurry until I cleared the coves of my eyes. I couldn't figure out where I was. There were black stones studding the shore, a trail of them leading to a bristling cluster of grass. Just past that, maybe twenty yards away, I caught a glimpse of a dark form flung on the sand. It was bent, obscenely bent. The sea tugged at it. I stared at it. Was it my brother? His arm? His leg? All of him? It could've been a tree limb. Panic beat inside, for me, for him, for me, for how far apart we were. I watched the bent thing being dragged into the water. I watched it disappear into the sea's frothing mouths; I saw it bobble up once and then go. I didn't move, or couldn't. I woke up on the beach alone and figured out that I had blacked out again. I was shaking fiercely. I turned to look out at where I had seen my brother but there was nothing but smooth sand now, and those stones dot-­dot-­dotting over it. I tried to get up but I couldn't. I curled slowly onto my side, grit grinding grit all over me. Rain came and went, waves came and went, shouting hoarsely at one another. I don't know how much time passed but when I opened my eyes, there was a head blocking the gray sky above me: a bizarre alien head, too big. I recognized the shape of our straw hat. Was this man wearing it? For some reason, I thought that if he had found our hat, then my brother, whose body I'd seen rolling in the surf, must truly be dead. "Where's Wayne?" I asked the man. The man turned and pointed to where I'd seen that bent form. Then he shook his alien head and yelled into the wind, which ate the words right out of his mouth. He leaned closer. He was white, in his forties or fifties, wearing a skyblue canvas windbreaker. I remember seeing his lips form the word "home" and how he mimed gestures of politeness--­"Can I touch you?" expressed with a pat, a questioning look--­before he lifted me up. I remember the steady leverage under my shoulders and knees, then a heavy tottering momentum over the sand, the rain pattering my face, the wind galling my ears. Excerpted from The Furrows: A Novel by Namwali Serpell 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.