Heroes of the Frontier

May 30, 2016
The frontier in Eggers’s (The Circle) appealing and affecting new novel is Alaska, but also, arguably, the adventures of its heroine, Josie. The core of the novel is relatable to anyone who has thought about suddenly starting over in an unknown place—which is to say, just about everyone. Thirty-something Josie has abruptly abandoned her failing dental practice and conventional life in Ohio, in search of something she can’t exactly define but knows that she needs. The move is a little less outrageous than it first appears, because Josie’s older sister, Sam, lives there, in a town called Homer. On the other hand, Josie has two young children, the fussy Ana and the old-beyond-his-years Paul. Eggers doesn’t tell the reader much about Josie’s Ohio life right away, except that she’s broken up with the children’s father, Carl, and has not yet told the children. In this way, the reader remains a bit unmoored throughout, which simulates Josie’s state of mind: she’s making it up as she goes along. For example, not having made smart financial calculations, she finds herself spending like a drunken sailor and constantly recalibrating her plan to explain this new situation to the children. Eggers’s shaggy plot may not be to all tastes, but his writing is fresh and full of empathy, his observations on modern society apt and insightful. 150,000-copy announced first printing.

May 15, 2016
A troubled dentist pulls up stakes and moves herself and her two children to Alaska.Josie, like the heroes of prior Eggers novels A Hologram for the King (2012) and The Circle (2013), is an archetypal figure, representative of how modern living corrodes our psyches. Josie has split from the slacker father of her two children, Ana and Paul; she's tormented by having encouraged a patient to sign up for the Marines who is then killed in action; and a malpractice suit effectively annihilates her practice. The only thing to be done, apparently, is to buy an RV and head from Ohio to southern Alaska, where her "stepsister who was not quite a stepsister" lives. Every romantic notion about heading for the hills is wrecked in short order: the RV is slow and hard to manage, let alone park; every beautiful vista abuts a tourist trap where staples are wildly overpriced; and Josie's stepsister has a cultic relationship with the locals that forbids sticking around. (And that "not a quite a stepsister" situation, once it's explained, is understandably awkward.) Between the novel's title, its episodic structure, and the scenes of rain and wildfire that shape the book's second half, it's clear Eggers means to craft a contemporary epic in which the bad guy is our lack of connection with nature. (Josie's stepsister lives in Homer.) Josie herself is an intermittently poignant and affecting figure, prone to comic musings about writing a musical about her hapless experiences or dourly fixating on a daymare of a bottle breaking across her face. But those details can't compensate for the overall baggy and rambling nature of the story, which doesn't meaningfully develop Josie's character and mainly reduces her children into plot complications. "We are not civilized people," Josie muses. But this novel is an unpersuasive glimpse into our nascent ferality. An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique.

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Starred review from May 15, 2016
Adept at literary reinvention, Eggers (Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, 2014) steers his ongoing social critique in an especially liberating new direction in this comedic outlaw odyssey. Josie is a dentist in Ohio with two children: somber and kind eight-year-old Paul and tempestuous five-year-old Ana. Josie's useless ex is in Florida, and there is no way she will allow the children to visit. Instead, she takes them to Alaska, renting a rattletrap RV with a vague plan to connect with a woman she refers to as her stepsister. It turns out that wildfires are rampaging the state, and Josie's own blazing fury induces her to take outrageous risks. Over the course of Josie's hilarious and scathing inner monologue about the depravity of our species, Eggers offers glimpses into her molten sorrows, including the death of her favorite patient in Afghanistan and a decimating malpractice lawsuit. As this trio of surprisingly resilient fugitives careens haphazardly from peril to refuge and back again, Eggers, writing with exuberant imagination, incandescent precision, and breathless propulsion, casts divining light on human folly and generosity and the glories and terror of nature. This uproarious quest, this breathless journey from lost to found, this delirious American road-trip saga, is fueled by uncanny insight, revolutionary humor, and profound pleasure in the absurd and the sublime. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Eggers is a sure bet for library holds, and this brilliant, funny, fast-moving novel will catch on quickly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)