The New Earth
A Novel
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Row's magisterial latest (after the essay collection White Flights) traces the complex dynamics of a New York City family on a geopolitical scale. In 2000, Wilcox patriarch Sandy, a lawyer, narrowly avoids disbarment after unwittingly aiding a client of fraud. A year later, his wife, Naomi, a geophysicist at Columbia University, reveals that her biological father was Black. Then, in 2003, their youngest child, Bering, is fatally shot by an Israeli Defense Force sniper while protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestine's West Bank. After Bering's death, her oldest brother, Patrick, goes to Nepal to become a monk. Sandy and Naomi's marriage, meanwhile, has been faltering since the late 1970s, when they founded a Zen monastery in Vermont, and following a failed suicide attempt a decade after Bering's death, Sandy leaves Naomi and retreats to Vermont, where he takes a vow of silence. Middle child Winter, a 20-something immigration lawyer, is marrying Zeno, an undocumented citizen, and wants nothing more than the family to be together at their wedding. Winter and Naomi also butt heads, big time, on race (Naomi insists they're white; Winter identifies as multiracial). As the Wilcoxes reckon with the limits of what they can bear, Winter's request proves tough to meet. Moments of levity draw the reader in (Sandy on shaving his head: "I look like Mr. Clean, he thinks, allowing himself one glimpse in the mirror, or Yul Brynner"), and the author pulls off many moving metafictional moments (Sandy, again, sensing the text of Row's novel: "He feels it embrace him, one animal embracing another; it smells like wet fur"). This is Row's best work yet.
