Excerpt from The New Earth by Jess Row, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I'm getting bitter, he's thinking, bitter and maudlin, exactly how I promised myself I wouldn't be. Losing my resolve. Not on Primo Levi Day. The fear of being lugubrious and maudlin. I should have a band behind me. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." I want to hear music. The impulse glows and fades. It's not a day for celebration, exactly. It's the quiet after the party is over.

* * *

Because he found family life unbearable and life without a family unbearable.

Because he tried, for fifteen years, which is long enough.

Because, biblically, his children abandoned him, and his wife abandoned him.

Because the world's vital signs are at an ebb. Because the body politic he clings to has been rolled, set upon, kicked into a corner, and offered only the faintest, saddest semblance of resistance. Perpetually indignant, shamed by its hypocrisies, tripped by its compromises, addicted to throat-clearing on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, above all made complacent by the easy life. The life of constant small adjustments and upgrades. And he's no different. Fallen into his life, recessed, barely able to read the paper, and now, for these brief few weeks, obsessed only with planning and curating his exit.

Not just no different. When we came back from Vermont, he remembers telling Brisman, more than once, in eighteen years of sessions, I was convinced we could still have an enlightened existence, here in the city, detached and engaged all at once, compassionate and purposeful. I mean we were senior meditators, for Christ's sake, I thought, You can't just wipe away the sheer depth of perception you gain from thousands of hours of zazen. And yet it was wiped away, in a heartbeat, I mean for a few years we were carried along in the torrent of child-raising, once Bering was born, especially, the sheer stress of the three of them howling like little jackals—we woke up sometime around 1989, after Naomi's tenure case was finally settled, and realized we were no more than the sum of our resentments, we were caught in the obverse of Indra's net, the narcissistic prism of so much seriously unfinished business, the price any couple pays for getting married at twenty-two, only slightly exaggerated by certain karmic residues—

What Sensei always said. When the great truth is forgotten, only the great lie remains.

White, he said to Louis once, is something no one can actually be. Except maybe Swedes and Norwegians. No American can be white, in the simple declarative sense. They have to say it defensively, antagonistically. I'm white and it's not my fault. And Louis said, actually putting a hand on his shoulder—they were sitting on a bench near the Great Lawn, waiting out one of Patrick and Jacob's interminable baseball games—It's all right, man, it's going to be all right. Someday she'll be ready. Give her time.

The kids will be fucking traumatized, he said, when she finally gets around to telling them it's not just that they tan easily.

The wind crosses him again as he crosses Broadway for the last time, so that he has to lean into it, so that it holds him up like a scarecrow. Women flattening skirts, newspapers whirling. The land wind. I'm sick of walking, he hums to himself. I'm done with walking. He thinks of the Audi, nestled in the dark, three inches to spare on all sides, the battery probably on its last legs. When was the last time it was inspected? Before Naomi left they'd been meaning to sell it, then he insisted on keeping it. We've had two cars all these years, he said, now you're saying we should go down to zero? Plus, I might want to come visit you.

Yeah—she said. Yeah with a high intonation, as if with another unvoiced word attached. Yeah, right. Yeah, you bet. Yeah, that's likely.

This was last July, when she was packing, when he still thought a one-year fellowship was a one-year fellowship, and then noticed a slab of boxes in the little study, tied up like a gift with plastic cord, delivered neat from the movers. There were movers? Look, she said, I bought a house there. Might as well put some stuff in it. We're bursting at the seams. I'm going to get some of Winter's college paintings framed. I want it to feel like a home.

Excerpted from The New Earth by Jess Row. Copyright © 2023 by Jess Row. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.