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A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity's uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row
For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine's West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper.
Now, in 2018, Winter Wilcox is getting married, and her only demand is that her mother, father, and brother emerge from their self-imposed isolations and gather once more. After decades of neglecting personal and political wounds, each remaining family member must face their fractured history and decide if they can ever reconcile.
Assembling a vast chorus of voices and ideas from across the globe, Jess Row "explodes the saga from within—blows the roof off, so to speak, to let in politics, race, theory, and the narrative self-awareness that the form had seemed hell-bent on ignoring" (Jonathan Lethem). The New Earth is a commanding investigation of our deep and impossible desire to undo the injustices we have both inflicted and been forced to endure.
The Upper West Side Book of The Dead
Recovered from: Drafts Folder (Unsent Message)
From: "Bering Wilcox"
Last saved: March 12, 2003 at 9:13:44 PM EST
To: "Patrick Hakuin Wilcox"
Subject: The Upper West Side Book of the Dead
Wadi Aboud, March 12
When the journey of my life has reached its end,
and since no relatives go with me from this world,
not even Great-Aunt Estie, who survived the Shoah,
two husbands, one in semiprecious stones,
one in schmattes—who always patted the couch
and said, "sit next to me, you make me feel younger,"
while she told the filthiest jokes—
when the journey of my life has reached its end,
in other words, may the peaceful and wrathful buddhas
send out the power of their compassion
and clear away the darkness of ignorance.
When parted from beloved friends, wandering alone—
as if I got up out of my sleeping bag, in Palestine,
and decided to walk home, as if there were
no barricades, no barbed wire, no blast walls,
and return to my childhood bedroom, on 79th
and Broadway—and when the terrors of the bardo appear
on that journey, the worst things I've ever done,
may the peaceful and wrathful ones, who know
all my secrets, sweeten my tongue with halvah,
chocolate-covered if possible, shoplifted
from the Zabar's checkout counter.
When I suffer through the power of my karma,
heaped up in this strange place, birthplace
I never chose, from the grand precipices of CPW,
the Dakota, the El Dorado, the stately brownstones,
that Nora Ephron domesticated New York,
lox-and-herring-and-Sunday-Times New York,
to the projects, the mamas smoking in pink
velour outside the McDonald's on 91st and Columbus,
smacking their kids, barking no me diga,
may the peaceful and wrathful buddhas remove
my impacted feelings like a bad molar
and give me new eyes, fresh eyes, to
forgive everyone their hypocrisies.
When I see my future parents in union,
may I see the peaceful and wrathful buddhas
with their consorts, with power to choose
my birthplace, for the good of others, may I do
more than just laugh and say, "well, it couldn't
get much worse"—because first I have to turn
and forgive them, my current parents, yes you,
Mommy, and remember you made me a birthday cake
once, from scratch, green frosting—
We ate it together at the dining table,
and then the lock turned and Trick rushed in,
cake!—dug his finger in, no hesitation—
And Daddy standing there, shrugging,
in the hallway: Easy, tiger. There's still
the dent in the plaster from where
the Pyrex hit the wall. It's not easy,
throwing a full baking dish across a
prewar dining room. If Trick hadn't ducked
he might not have his front teeth now.
We sat there eating frosting off the wall,
frosting mixed with paint chips, eating
the building, as you two screamed in the kitchen.
When it was clear no one was making dinner,
Winter emptied her piggy bank,
and we went downstairs to La Caridad,
twelve, ten, and nine, ordered black bean chicken
and rice and beans to share three ways.
My point is: remember the cake, too. Sweeten
my tongue with that cake. When I am truly
lost, peaceful and wrathful buddhas, remind
me I am forgivable, they are forgivable,
none of us are only one thing, we have past
and future selves. You could say: I came here
to know Israel and Palestine, two implacable
parents at war (Yoron told me, the first
day of nonviolence training, you look like
someone who's used to arguing) only to realize
the abject stupidity of this rhetoric of bodies.
Terrorism of postures, terrorism of the present.
I came here to learn what peace actually means.
It means implacable patience. It means having
a better memory than those around you.
But most of all: sweeten your tongue.
When Heba saw me leave yesterday morning with
my Day-Glo vest and International Monitor helmet
she brought me a last cup of tea,
I taste it now, like a mint gumdrop, and
said, la hawla ...
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.
Jess Row's novel The New Earth begins in 2018, the trenches of the Trump years, when life became especially dangerous and precarious for undocumented immigrants in the United States, and when hope for a better, less cruel world seemed at a new low.
In these environs, Winter Wilcox, an immigration lawyer in Providence, Rhode Island, suddenly and surprisingly decides to marry her partner Zeno, an undocumented immigrant from Chiapas, Mexico, with whom she's having a child. Surprisingly because both Winter and Zeno have strained relationships with their families and don't want to replicate the dynamics they grew up in—and also because Zeno could be deported at any time, making planning a wedding for five months in the future impractically optimistic.
But a wedding is a tried-and-true way to, dramatically speaking, get the gang back together again, and the Wilcoxes need an extremely good reason to reunite. Calling them "dysfunctional" is an understatement; "broken into pieces and scattered around the globe" is closer to reality. Much of The New Earth, then, is not about what happens in the five months before the wedding, but about "how we got here," by which I don't mean how the US ended up in the fascist doldrums of 2018 (although that, too) but how the Wilcox family became so unhappy and estranged. We learn in the opening chapters that Naomi (the matriarch) has left Sandy (her husband) and begun living with a new partner, a woman; that Patrick, the elder son, has not returned to the US in 15 years, after escaping initially to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal, and is barely managing his myriad mental and physical health issues; and Sandy has been planning—and attempts, in the first few pages, but does not succeed—to kill himself. The book does have ample flashbacks and scenes of backstory, but much of the "how we got here" information is relayed in an interesting combination of a) conversations in present-day between characters who are mostly replaying or relitigating the past; and b) documents like voicemail transcripts, emails and snippets from chat forums, which allow characters to explain their own histories.
One reason The New Earth feels so of the Trump era, even though much of the drama and messiness takes place in decades past, is because it so urgently asks the question of how to live in a radical way, in revolt against oppression and conservatism. Most of the book's characters have, in some way or another, attempted to live in such a way in the past, only to be thwarted; the subsequent pain and disillusion is a big reason that present-day relations are so strained. Sandy and Naomi met at Oberlin College and lived, as a young couple, as Buddhists in a commune in Vermont; that optimistic, hippie phase of their life ended when Reagan was elected in 1980 and when Naomi had an affair with their sensei. Their youngest daughter, Bering, left college to become a peace activist in Palestine in 2003, where she was murdered by the Israel Defense Forces. Zeno's mother was a Zapatista (see Beyond the Book) in Chiapas, where she was also killed, and Zeno and his father still live in the wake of her radical politics and death. The New Earth, then, is clear-eyed about the way that standing up to fascism—or simply living a non-conformist life; or working, as Winter does, on behalf of vulnerable populations—is exhausting and painful at best and deadly at worst. But Row persists in imagining a better world. The novel drags together these disparate, jaded characters to talk it out and plan for the future, and in the process, the once small, nuclear Wilcox family expands.
This could seem corny and false, the way anti-Trump liberalism can seem corny and happyish endings can seem false, but it doesn't; The New Earth works for a few reasons, one of which is Row's unequivocal condemnation of Israel's occupation of Palestine and apartheid state, from a Jewish-American perspective (the Wilcox family is culturally Jewish but barely religious). The other is his wide-ranging curiosity and deep research. There's so much context here—so much to learn and to consider—about everything from the Zapatista movement to Israel's colonial history, to quantum entanglement to ocean science. There's even a plotline about Holocaust art forgery.
For all the pain and damage the novel describes (the Wilcox children suffer from depression and bad parenting and the crushing weight of shame and secrets) and for all Row's desire to elucidate different types of oppression (anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, xenophobia), The New Earth does lack a certain gravity. Perhaps that's because so much of it seems to be written in explanatory monologues; the pain is sometimes felt on the page, but usually just talked about, in the angry, precocious way that all the characters talk. It reminded me a little of Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, another Trump-era story of the border crisis and historical genocide, refracted through the story of a bourgeois nuclear family. But Lost Children Archive seemed to me to be a little harder and sadder than The New Earth, and hazy images of the family's road trip have stuck with me for years. The New Earth may be slightly too straightforward, or lacking in subtlety, to stick in this way, not because the world it depicts isn't complex but because everyone, with one standout exception, is basically honest about what they've done and what they want; they talk to each other like they have nothing to lose. The result is that things can only go up from here, and so nothing will break your heart.
Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer
Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
In Jess Row's novel The New Earth, the character Zeno's mother was a Zapatista in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, where she was killed. The Zapatistas are an indigenous peasant movement from Chiapas named for the Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata. They formed in 1983, organized secretly for 10 years, and then gained worldwide recognition in 1994, when they incited a rebellion against the government. The resistance movement still exists today and remains proudly undefeated by the state.
Mexico has the largest indigenous population in Latin America, and Chiapas is over one-quarter indigenous. Indigenous people have historically been excluded from basic services such as education and healthcare there; and although Chiapas is one of the wealthiest states in Mexico in terms of natural resources (including 30% of Mexico's fresh water supply), it has the highest poverty rates of all of the country's 32 states. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), an armed guerrilla organization, was formed out of these conditions, intent on representing the rights of Chiapas' indigenous people and demanding the Mexican government put an end to indigenous segregation and oppression.
On January 1, 1994, the EZLN protested the adoption of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), because they knew that free trade, and neoliberalism and globalization in general, would have a devastating effect on Mexico's agricultural workers and rural communities. Armed members of the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Ch'ol and Tojolabal indigenous peoples—some barefoot, some carrying antique or wooden guns—took over cities all around Chiapas, freeing prisoners, burning military outposts and claiming the ranches of rich landowners. Their rebellion made them instant heroes on the left.
Notably, one-third of the EZLN insurgents were women; from the beginning, Zapatista leaders insisted that women could participate at all levels, and in 1993, a year before their rebellion, they had passed the Women's Revolutionary Law, which established basic rights for women, including political participation.
Subcomandante Marcos, the most prominent member of EZLN leadership, famously stated on the day of the 1994 revolution that the "fourth world war against neoliberalism and oblivion" had begun. In their First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, the EZLN declared: "We, the men and women of the EZLN, full and free are conscious that the war that we have declared is a last resort, but also a just one… we ask for your participation in and support of this plan that struggles for work, land housing, food, healthcare, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace."
In response to the uprising, the Mexican government sent an army of tanks, soldiers and helicopter gunships to quash the rebellion, but the state failed against the Zapatista guerillas. Mexico was forced to sign the 1995 San Andrés Accords, in which the country recognized indigenous peoples' collective rights, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the government continued to terrorize rebel sympathizers and their families in order to drive the Zapatistas out of public life.
But the Zapatistas were never defeated, and have never disarmed. Instead, they have created a society in the Lacandon Jungle that is organized against the increasing neoliberalization of Mexico, and is based on collective production and services.
A Tzotzil Zapatista woman—who was masked so as to not reveal her identity—told a journalist in 2018: "We do not need the government. We do not use them. We have our own indigenous government. We have different problems now, but we are finding the solutions ourselves. It is much better. There are many more of us, too… We are developing a new form of governance. The decisions [about how we live] are now made by the communities, not by government."
Editor's update: As of November 2023, the Zapatistas announced plans to dissolve their "autonomous municipalities," but it has been suggested that they have intentions to continue organizing at a community level.
Graffiti on a wall of the historic center of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, México that reads "Los Zapatistas viven" (The Zapatistas live).
Photo by Emiglex (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities
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