The Year We Left Home

Thompson's latest is more a loosely connected collection of short stories than a novel. Members of the Erickson clan of Iowa appear, disappear, and then reappear throughout the thirty-year span of the book. Individual chapters stand alone as they tell a slice of the family's history, but they don't have any feeling of connection to each other. Although Cassandra Campbell has done a first-rate job on other audiobooks, this one is hard to follow because she seems to place pauses in unexpected places, especially in dialogue. Although the family's story hits universal themes of love, alienation, and reconciliation, her matter-of-fact delivery distances the listener from engaging with the characters. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

January 31, 2011
Bookended by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq—Thompson's third novel (after the collection Do Not Deny Me) sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: "she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure." The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita, the beauty of the family, celebrates her marriage. Over the years, however, Anita confronts dissatisfaction with herself and disillusionment with her pompous husband. Her younger brother, Ryan, a high school senior as the novel opens, longs to escape his rural roots, dating a hippie poet and majoring in political science before realizing that the farmers who came before him might hold more relevance than he'd imagined. Cousin Chip comes back from Vietnam troubled and aimless, his wanderings from Seattle to Reno, Nev., to Veracruz, Mexico, offering a parallel to the spiritual restlessness all the other characters feel. Told from the point of view of more than a half-dozen characters, the vignettes that make up the narrative are generally powerful in isolation, but as a whole fail to develop into anything more than a series of snapshots of a family touched by time and tragedy.