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

She inspects her hands.

"I was in the car," she says, "in my little Beetle, on I-95, on the way back from my great-aunt Sylvie's funeral. On election day. I was planning to drive straight back to New York that night. I was pregnant, five months pregnant, with Andrew. I had my viola in the car with me, because Sylvie had asked that I play something at the memorial. Some Yiddish song she loved. 'Oyfn Pripetshik.' Anyway, by around New Haven I was starving and so I pulled over at a diner, a truck stop. I remember it was a truck stop, because it had pay phones right there on the tables, one at every booth. So I was sitting there with the case between my knees, I was too scared to even leave it on the seat next to me, and I decided I would call Stan and just let him know I'd be home really late, past midnight. And when he picked up, he said, 'Thank god you called. I just got off the phone with James Levine. You passed the audition. You got the job. Also, Reagan won.' And do you know what I remember thinking?"

"No, what?"

"'Life is very long.'"

They laughed together.

"Because I'd already had what I thought of as a full life. A whole life."

"Tell me about it."

"We'd put our skin and blood, what's the expression? Blood, sweat, and tears, into that farm. New Morning Farm. For six years, before it collapsed. We all got hepatitis. Stan probably never told you the story."

"He alluded to it."

"In any case. The details aren't important." She seems childlike, he thinks, seized with eagerness. It makes him recoil. "When Reagan came to power, to us it was like the end of Weimar. Jimmy Carter was a Weimar president. Massive inflation. Social chaos and disorder. Metal machine music."

Now she licks her lips. Actually licks them.

Because he gets so many of the off clients, the characters, Mark calls them, the firm has configured his office so he can see straight over the client's shoulder through a window to Joni's desk, and Joni, whoever she is at the moment, can look up, periodically, and if he raises an eyebrow, rescue him. Ethan needs to ask you a question. Also he leaves the door open an inch or two, in violation of every American Bar Association guideline. Because sometimes it's all in the intonation. Joni gives him a questioning look. He smiles and shakes his head.

"You know, we were going on with our lives, just as you said. Raising Andrew and Sarah. Making actual money. And for me, of course, playing extraordinary music, night after night. I'm not talking about the repertoire. I'm talking about Koyaanisqatsi. The Death of Klinghoffer. And all the time, I was expecting that Reagan was preparing for the end, for the next Holocaust. God, you know, that was the eighties. People actually ate caviar, you remember? They served it, at parties. Ordinary people. And the whole time, because of course I was doing it too, I was eating caviar and waiting for the sirens that would tell us the coup had started. I don't think I had a single good night's sleep until the wall came down in '89. And by then the kids were almost teenagers."

This conversation is losing its usefulness, he thinks. Its direction. A wayward paper boat of a conversation on tidal swells of historical anger.

"You know what happened to me recently?" he says. "I went to my doctor, after the election, because I was having heart pain. Seriously. Not the crushing heart-attack kind. And not heartburn. Heart pain. It was hard to look at things, hard to see things and feel alive. I felt crushed."

"Well join the goddamned club."

"I mean outside of the mishegas in Washington. I'm talking about everyday misery, people yelling at their kids on the street. Homeless people. Syria. Not to mention kids in cages in Texas. It all whips together with your memories, the things you've seen, the people you've been, right? That pain," he said, "is congestion. Congestion of emotions. A calcification of feelings. Too much feeling over too much time. And I said to the doctor, what do I do about it? Do? he said. Feel lucky. Be grateful you still have the capacity."

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.