The Reenchantment of the Ordinary World | Los Angeles Review of Books (original) (raw)

Rhoda Feng reviews Téa Obreht’s new novel “The Morningside.”

The Morningside by Téa Obreht. Random House, 2024. 304 pages.

IN 2020, TÉA OBREHT wrote a story for The _New York Times Magazine_’s Decameron Project, a series of short fiction pieces commissioned in the early months of the pandemic. Obreht’s story had many features of a fairy tale: a displaced child; a mysterious, possibly villainous older woman; animals laden with symbolism. Its protagonist was Silvia, a young girl who relocates with her mother to the Morningside, a once-luxurious high-rise. The two have escaped a war-torn homeland, and as Silvia adjusts to her new life, she becomes fascinated by a neighbor, an enigmatic artist who resides on the 14th floor of the apartment building with three large hounds. Silvia’s curiosity about this neighbor leads her into a string of risky nighttime adventures with another young neighbor.

As Marina Warner has written, common wisdom has it that fairy tales are “one-dimensional, depthless, abstract, and sparse; their characteristic manner is matter-of-fact.” From her earliest work, Obreht has demonstrated an interest in eluding this expectation. She crafts multidimensional fairy tales—strange hybrid works that combine the magical with the mundane. The prose is velveted in descriptions that are anything but “matter-of-fact.” Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), published when she was only 25, earned its author comparisons to Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Gabriel García Márquez. In language at once precise and polysemous, itresurrects stories about a “deathless man” and the titular tiger’s wife. When the novel begins, Natalia, a doctor in an unnamed Balkan village, has just learned that her grandfather “died in a clinic in an obscure town called Zdrevkov.” His death doesn’t come as a total shock to her as she knew for some time that he was ill. She embarks on a “goodwill mission” with her friend Zóra, “an open atheist,” to inoculate children at the Brejevina orphanage, and the novel pivots between her humanitarian mission and fables passed down by her grandfather.

Natalia’s earliest memory centers on a tiger. As a child, she is taken to a zoo by her grandfather to see the animals; their smell is so overpowering that it stays with her the whole day and “will return at random times […] even years later.” Pandemonium erupts at the tiger cage when a zookeeper puts his arm through the bars. The tiger holds the man’s arm “the way a dog holds a large bone” and starts gnawing at the top. The gruesome event prefigures a story her grandfather later relates about “a girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one herself.” In interviews, Obreht has referred to animals as her “Whac-A-Mole theme: no matter how often she hits it, it’s going to pop back up.” Throughout her fiction, there’s a consistent sense that beasts of burden are not simply what Russian formalist Vladimir Propp called “magical helpers,” creatures that help the protagonist overcome specific obstacles, but that they play a larger role in shaping characters’ ethical attachments to others and the more-than-human world.

Humans’ relationships with animals are even more prominent in Obreht’s next—and, to my mind, finest—book, Inland (2019). Set in the arid lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, the novel is really two stories that proceed along parallel tracks. In one narrative, an outlaw-cum-cameleer named Lurie tells a rollicking tale of being pursued by a sheriff for killing a boy in New York and subsequently stumbling into more misadventures with a man named Hadji Ali—“a brooding, handsome, steadfast Syrian Turk whose smile was constant but almost never sincere.” It is Ali—tasked with transporting 33 camels “from all parts of the Orient” to San Antonio, “there to serve as pack animals for the cavalry”—who gives Lurie his first view of the creatures. In an early chapter, Lurie recounts how Ali, inviting a quizzical crowd in the Texas town of Indianola to “assemble a freight heavy enough to keep the camel from standing up,” wagers that his beast of burden will be able to carry up to 1,500 pounds. The residents proceed to load various implements, including “an ancient cannonball,” “kettles and pans,” “whiskey kegs and fireirons and gunnysacks of grain,” “laundry carts,” “bales of hay,” and “chamberpots,” onto the camel’s back. When Ali bade the dromedary rise, the narrator recounts,

it unfolded like a dream making itself up as it went. Falteringly, it rocked forward and up and back, strutted one set of legs, one set of leathery thumbprint knees, and then the other, scaffolding itself, tilting its rider around as though he were just another protrusion of its own damnable anatomy.

Lurie is bewitched by the animal’s strength and inveigles himself into Hadji Ali’s camel corps.

For a long stretch, the narrator is content to let us simply assume that he’s setting down his story in writing or perhaps telling it to a fellow bipedal traveler. It’s not until page 85 that we learn that Lurie, “a small Levantine of about twenty-three years in age,” is speaking to his camel, who has become his closest companion. Our first proper view of this camel—named Burke, for the “fearsome, gargling _buuuurk_” he regularly emits—is indelible: “[A] snake neck and frowsy mane. A huge periscope head turning slowly this way and that. A tent-peg underbite.” Obreht once told an interviewer: “I always approach describing an animal as if I’m describing it to someone who’s never seen it.” Inland gracefully bears this out: Obreht has a jeweler’s eye for physical description, and almost everything that can be known about camels is set down in tactile prose. The book was partly inspired by the “journals, letters, and reports” of real figures like Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a lieutenant who formed the first US Camel Corps in 1857 and whose successful expedition using camels as pack animals between San Antonio and Los Angeles stirred War Department interest in the creatures. Still, even as it’s anchored in historical events, the novel never feels unnecessarily weighed down by them.

_Inland_’s second, parallel narrative centers on Nora, a housewife hemmed in by drought and dread secrets. When the novel opens, she finds herself in a Penelope-like predicament, waiting for her husband’s return home. That husband, Emmett, who edits and publishes one of the town’s two small newspapers, has gone in search of water, leaving her to keep a nervous eye on the dwindling supply in the rain barrel and on her youngest son, Toby, who has trouble with his own eyesight. Her two eldest sons have also lit out from home—ostensibly to track down their father, but Nora becomes less and less sure about the reasons for their disappearance with each passing hour. Unlike the chapters narrated by Lurie, which span decades, the sections relating to Nora are told from a close third-person perspective and unfurl over the course of a single day. Yet both sections ravel out ways that the living commune with, and are influenced by, the dead.

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Obreht’s newest book, The Morningside (2024), is an expanded version of the story she wrote in 2020 for the New York Times. Like its maquette, the novel is set in an urban environment resembling New York City. The short prologue compacts, in bouillon cube fashion, the major themes of the book: the fraught relationship between a daughter and her mother, climate disaster (the air is “unusually free of wildfire smoke, blue, and windless”), and the plight of refugees. More so than in her previous books, Obreht pays attention here to the reality-warping effects of climate change.

“[M]ost people, especially those for whom such towers were intended, had fled the privation and the rot and the rising tide and gone upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” announces Sil, the book’s narrator. Sil (or Silvia) is an 11-year-old refugee from a place called Sarobor, a fictional stand-in for Mostar, a city in the former Yugoslavia that is also referenced in The Tiger’s Wife. Sil moves into the eponymous building in Island City with her mother as part of the federal “Repopulation Program.” As Sil tells us, “The Morningside had been the jewel of an upper-city neighborhood called Battle Hill for more than a century,” and in the wake of a climate disaster that “had been threatening for decades,” officials have rolled out a “Posterity Initiative,” which hands out “ration cards” to newcomers and dangles the carrot of “a new townhouse on South Falls Island” to lure settlers to do their part “to revive the city.” The building’s penthouse on the 33rd floor, served by its own elevator, is occupied by the mysterious Bezi Duras, a painter, and her “three behemoth hounds,” “black as the gaps between stars.” “She was from Back Home, too,” Sil says, “but had come to Island City years ago, well before the war, and so could scarcely line up five words of Ours, and then only in a disgraceful accent.”

Silvia’s mother takes scrupulous care to avoid discussing the old country referred to as “Back Home.” “The notion of home being ‘gone’ had been instilled in me for as long as I could remember,” Sil tells us. She and her mother share an apartment with Silvia’s aunt Ena, who lives in a two-bedroom suite on the 10th floor and is the building’s current superintendent. Unlike Silvia’s practical, jill-of-all-trades mother, Ena revels in sharing stories about their family’s origin. Her apartment is scattered with “scrapbooks,” “pictures, cards, pamphlets”—many belonging to or showcasing her now-deceased wife Beanie. “I didn’t know much about love, but this felt like it to me. A persistent keeping-around of the object of your affection. A surrounding of the self,” Silvia observes.

Like the grandfather in The Tiger’s Wife, Ena also delights in telling fables. One of these stories is about a wily mountain spirit called the Vila. The Vila of Modra Gora was famed for her fruit trees and had three sons, who could assume the form of a variety of animals. During harvest time, her sons would tempt fruit pickers to cross the stone wall separating the Vila’s fruits from those of Silvia’s great-grandmother, or baba. One day, a king shows up and decides to erect a castle “on the eastern shore of the river that drained into Needle Bay.” He seeks the Vila’s permission to build the castle, and after plying her with gifts, he wins her assent. The town grows so prosperous that houses start spilling over to the river’s western shore. The king decides to build a bridge, but each attempt to do so crumbles into literal dust: the Vila’s powerful screams bring the bridges down. Three frustrated years later, the king finally decides to ask the Vila for permission to build a bridge. She agrees on the condition that he “choose a woman from [his] town to be bricked up, alive, in the bridge’s foundations.” He decides it’s only fair for the sacrifice to be made from within his own family and comes up with a plan to sacrifice one of his sons’ wives. But his plan backfires and the woman he ends up sacrificing is his own daughter, his favorite child. At the end of this tale, Ena presents Silvia with a jar of fig jam: “I peered down at it, this precious stuff, soil and water and sunlight and the fruit they had borne, all concentrated into half an ounce of brittle darkness.” It’s a reverse Proustian moment that also calls to mind the canteen that _Inland_’s Lurie wears around his neck at all times: tasting of “rain and river,” “iron and salt,” it contains the water of “six rivers” and, in the words of another character, is “really everything.”

Like Lurie and Josie of Inland, who live “between worlds,” Silvia and her aunt are attuned to a “world underneath the world.” To the consternation of her mother, Silvia, who exhibits OCD-like behavior, is in the habit of making “protections,” a circuit of three talismanic objects, such as a jar, a pair of scissors, and an empty perfume bottle, secreted throughout the house. In the Morningside, she apprentices herself to her aunt, checking empty apartments for signs of “disruption.” Obreht has said that she is interested in “who people are when no one else is around,” and Silvia, who is wait-listed at the city’s school, has ample time to do odd jobs that can be “accomplished in secret, in solitude.” Her rounds of the apartments put her in touch with many dead animals: she finds the “desiccated corpse of a bat,” “frog carcasses and fish spines,” “rat teeth and fur,” and “spoil heaps of feathers” from “rook cranes wily enough to nest, unobserved, for a week or a month on a balcony.” But the creatures that most capture Silvia’s attention are Bezi Duras’s hounds, beasts that “looked like they were made of soot and steel wool. As though they’d started out as gaunt shadows long ago and somehow assembled themselves over the years from leaves and bits of darkness they’d rolled in along the way.” Ena plants the idea in her niece’s mind that the dogs are really “men during the day” who transform into dogs at night, but before Silvia can interrogate her further on this point, Ena abruptly dies from an aneurysm.

Ena’s death gives birth to an obsession: discovering what (or who) occupies Duras’s penthouse. Silvia starts tracking her neighbor’s movements and notices that she only takes her dogs out for walks at night. On one of her early snooping expeditions, Silvia meets a “portly-looking” Black man who seems vaguely familiar. She later recognizes him as one of the people whose faces her aunt had pinned up in her “security shed” and, accordingly, remains on guard whenever she encounters him. The snoop, whose name is Lewis May, held the position of superintendent before Ena. He quickly cottons on to the fact that Silvia is trying to gain access to Duras’s penthouse and promises to give her a spare key to the elevator if she retrieves all the letters delivered to his former mailbox. She accepts the bargain. To her disappointment, the key is only good for the elevator and not Duras’s apartment. Nevertheless, what she discovers in the rooftop gardens—a fragrant orchard bursting with lemons, oranges, plums, and figs—more than confirms her belief that Duras is a Vila, maybe even the Vila from Ena’s tale.

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The Morningside is less digressive than Obreht’s previous novels. Even so, the author similarly indulges in fleshing out robust backstories even for minor characters. Thus, we learn in one chapter that, before becoming a super, Lewis May was a writer who went by the name Lamb Osmond. He wrote three books, one of which received “modest acclaim,” but his career was torpedoed after he was accused of incorporating poems by a dead girl into one of his short stories. Rather than being organically presented—for instance, as one of the stories relayed over the Drowned City Dispatch radio station—the information about May’s past life is awkwardly introduced as a stand-alone chapter, which interrupts the flow of the main narrative and distances us from the narrator.

Similarly, while any novel narrated by an older version of the protagonist necessitates a kind of double vision, here there are problems of modulation. Silvia never really sounds or thinks like an adolescent: an 11-year-old would never refer to her mother as “chiropteran” or to her “panopticon of an aunt,” and would not likely be able to give a nuanced interpretation of a newspaper article headlined “Modern Medeas.” The only other child in the building is even more of a cipher. Halfway into the novel, Mila, a “slight, thin-faced girl” with the “huge green eyes of a night creature” moves into apartment 32C with her mother and father. Silvia first catches sight of her new neighbor “directing a procession of huge, mummified furnishings down the truck ramp and along the sidewalk, completely unfazed by the expletives of the stalled drivers who couldn’t get around her.” Silvia’s mother, who by now has assumed the mantle of superintendent from Ena, thinks of Mila as “a little viper” and warns her daughter not to speak to her in the language of “Ours.” Silvia bristles at this and especially resents the fact that her mother’s “secretiveness had confined us to solitude, to a loneliness that had ruled us both for years.” Eager to make a friend her own age, Silvia shares her suspicions about Bezi Duras and her dogs with Mila, and in no time the girls are following the old woman on her nocturnal walks. In one journey, they come upon a house on South Falls Island inhabited by an old woman and her three young sons; Silvia is convinced that the woman is Duras in altered form.

Some days later, at a rooftop party she is hosting, the painter reveals to a crowd of journalists and other Morningside residents that she has been visiting the island to photograph its “settlement structures.” She discovers that “the ones still standing are ruins” and claims that government subsidies are “not going to the people the program has promised to help.” In her view, the city is bringing refugees “here not to build the city back up—but to hold the edges while it finishes falling.” As if to drive this point home, Obreht visits calamity on Silvia’s mother, who, after Ena’s death, becomes a certified salvage diver. On one dive, Silvia’s mother and three other divers get trapped by a “piece of siding the size of an infield.”

For days, Silvia is in a state of uncertainty: Has her mother died or will she be rescued? Has something happened to her “protection”? Is this the doing of the Vila? Even if we intuit that the story has a noncalamitous ending—that it abides by the spirit of “heroic optimism” that Angela Carter characterized as fundamental to fairy tales—the novel’s final chapters sustain a feeling of real suspense. Another name for fairy tale is “wonder tale” (Wundermärchen), and at its best, Obreht’s usefully estranging novel has the power to reenchant the ordinary world.

LARB Contributor

Rhoda Feng is an editor at LARB and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Artforum, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times, Frieze, Vogue, The Baffler, 4Columns, The Boston Globe, and more.

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