BookBrowse Reviews The New Earth by Jess Row

BookBrowse:

A sprawling, cacophonous story about a broken family struggling to reunite, and about the possibilities and pain of rebelling against the status quo.

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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.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2023, and has been updated for the July 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.