Wreck and Order

Starred review from November 23, 2015
In Tennant-Moore’s sharp, confident debut novel, Elsie, a bright young woman in her 20s who is equal parts self-assured and self-destructive, isn’t afraid to name her feelings: “lust, rage, lust, rage.” But she’s at a loss for how to reconcile herself with the injustice in the world and “just be a decent person.” Encouraged by her indulgent father, who, thanks to inheriting a small fortune, floats her money when she needs it, she skips college for a life made on her own terms, travelling around the world: to Paris where she’s “overcome by own worthlessness” at not being able to communicate and sublimates it by attempting to translate an out-of-print book about stray cats; to California, where she can’t escape a destructive attraction to Jared, a small-time drug dealer; and New York City, where her career ambitions give way to a relationship with Brian, who is stable and successful—but ultimately square (not to mention a selfish lover)—and quick to break off their short-lived engagement. Seeking a change in her life, Elsie backpacks around Sri Lanka, but Tennant-Moore is far too sophisticated and nuanced a writer to allow Elsie to be miraculously healed by the mysterious East. Instead, Tennant-Moore provides no easy answers, deftly illustrating Elsie’s inner monologue as she tries to face up to herself and the people around her. The book has a broad appeal, and many young women will keep it stacked on their bookshelf next to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and cart it with them like a talisman through the various bad apartments of their 20s.

December 1, 2015
Tennant-Moore's sharp debut follows a defiantly self-destructive young woman--powerfully intelligent and profoundly lost--as she grapples with identity, spirituality, and purpose. Elsie, recently returned from a miserable year in Paris--her alternative to college--and now reveling in her own free fall, has a job writing obituaries for her small-town Southern California paper and an explosive relationship with an alcoholic rockabilly guitarist/drug dealer named Jared ("Here was an answer to the question of what to do with my life," she notes, bleakly). Trying to escape both Jared and her current existence, she buys a ticket to Sri Lanka. "I had known other versions of myself that allowed me to hope the situation I was in would not be my life," she explains. Sri Lanka, appealing for both its incongruity--"a tropical paradise that was also a recent war zone"--and its distance, offers a kind of desperate hope. This could be the beginning of an exhausted cliche: young, pretty American woman has transformative experience traveling through Third World country; meets local people; finds meaning and purpose. But it isn't--this is not that book. Elsie does develop meaningful connections, of course, but even her most intimate interactions are fraught, warm but complicated; upon returning home, she is not transformed. "I felt I could handle the wrong choices now, that I could live the old life in a new way," she explains: more Jared, more drifting, a fledgling French translation project, another man, another troubled relationship. And then a letter arrives that draws her back to Sri Lanka for a trip that is both deeper and more demanding than the first. With bracing insight, Tennant-Moore captures not only Elsie's inner life, but also her physical existence; the novel stands out not only for its emotional precision, but for its incredible attention to the visceral realities of having a body. Often unsettling, sometimes funny, always meticulously observed; a quietly intoxicating novel that resists easy answers.

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January 1, 2016
Elsie doesn't have to worry about money. What she does have to worry about, however, is her aimless existence with a borderline-abusive boyfriend and a job at the local paper working on obituaries. When she decides to travel to Sri Lanka to escape her predictable life, she finds herself discovering a new way of living. Upon returning after a meditative retreat, she moves to New York and becomes engaged to a man who is everything she is notreliable, stable, and sure of himself. But she rebels against this potentially suffocating future and returns again to Sri Lanka, staying with a young woman desperate to practice her English. Tennant-Moore's descriptions of life in Sri Lanka are rich with the rapturous detail caught by a visitor's eye. As Elsie grapples with her issues, particularly around sex and intimacy, she finds that life in a country where she is both free to be herself and more uncertain of her place than ever somehow allows her to tackle her problems from a new perspective. The result is sharp, fresh, and breathtakingly honest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)