What to read this week: the land we belong to is grand!
Gold and the American dream, in three ways.
Lemon, it’s Tuesday.
Today I have three recommendations: one long, two short. Let’s dive in.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here by Nancy Wayson Dinan
We’re living in a golden age of climate fiction. Nancy Wayson Dinan’s gorgeous debut novel, Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here, is one of a growing number of recent titles to address themes of climate catastrophe, and it’s easily one of my favorites of the year. Things You Would Know… has much in common with Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot, which I reviewed in April. (Spoiler: I liked it.) But while Bieker used the setting of a drought-stricken agricultural region turned Dust Bowl to spin a primal scream of a story about women’s suffering in the near future, Dinan builds her narrative around the Memorial Day floods that rocked Central Texas in 2015, telling a gentler, more fantastical story about the radical power of empathy in the vein of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sowers.
Her heroine, 18-year-old Boyd Montgomery, is supernaturally empathetic to the point of self-isolation. Homeschooled since junior high, when her capacity to feel the pain of others became too overwhelming to manage, she instead takes refuge in the solitude of the rural Hill Country, struggling to raise a garden despite the increasingly inhospitable Texas climate. The primary exception to her self-imposed isolation is her close friend Isaac, a sweet but keenly ambitious college student whose love and affection for Boyd runs as deep as his understanding that their relationship has no romantic future thanks to their diverging plans for the rest of their lives.
Boyd is content to spend her time panning for gold in the backyard with Isaac, who is wrestling with his own desire to get out of the country and lead a more conventional suburban life. (Or, to put it in Dixie Chicks terms: she’s very Cowboy Take Me Away, but he’s more inclined to take The Long Way Around.) Dinan writes Boyd and Isaac’s relationship and the mutual affinity and tenderness between them with remarkable thoughtfulness, which means that when torrential rains bring on a flood of Biblical proportions and Isaac goes missing, Boyd choosing to set off alone to rescue him feels completely believable. What follows is a surreal heroine’s journey that, to put it plainly, made me go absolutely feral, coupled with a striking eulogy for the ravaged farmland of Central Texas.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the similarities between the new wave of climate change fiction and the frontier fiction that shaped our cultural image of the American West. The classic frontier story is one of man vs. nature, depicting the earth as a beast, a terrifying entity to be settled and tamed. The American myth of manifest destiny imagined the settler as conqueror, called on by God to domesticate and take control of the land by any means necessary. The cowboys and mountain men of frontier fiction reflected the primary sensibilities of white masculinity: stoicism, virility, toughness, driven by a conquerer’s desire that justified any acts of violence, small-scale or large. What is climate fiction if not the postcolonial rebuttal to all those myths about how the West was won? After over a century of stories that glorified the settler, the climate fiction coming out of the 2010s and 2020s depicts the exploited earth in revolt.
Across cultures and millennia, we’ve always spoken about nature in ways that invoke womanhood and femininity: the goddess Gaia, Mother Nature, the clinical reproductive terminology that describes land as “fertile” or “barren.” So, with all due respect to Cormac McCarthy and Kim Stanley Robinson, is it any surprise that the best climate fiction has been written by women? Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Barbara Kingsolver, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Helen Marshall have all written genre-defining books that did more than use climate catastrophe as a timely setting for a harrowing adventure tale. The best books in this vein reckon with the plundering and pillaging that humans have enacted against the earth, framing it not as progress but violence. That violence feels inextricably entwined with violence against women after centuries of gendered language and metaphors that taught us all to personify the earth as a woman. Dinan plays with those associations and others, invoking imagery dating much further back than the Louisiana Purchase: storms and goddesses, mothers and daughters, amniotic fluid and primordial ooze, pomegranates and the divine feminine. The result is a neat inversion of the cowboy-conqueror myth, giving us a heroine whose strength comes not from her ability to overpower nature but to understand it, to feel pain rather than cause it. Rather than the stoicism of the frontiersman, true resilience in the climate crisis calls for empathy, community, and listening — to the land, and to each other.
Thanks to Bloomsbury for providing an advance copy. I really loved this book. If you read and enjoyed Godshot, you probably will too.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here is available now. Click here to buy it on Bookshop.
You should also read…
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang — Another book that challenges and rewrites the mythology of the American frontier, this time through the eyes of two first-generation Chinese-American siblings forced to fend for themselves amidst the twilight years of the California gold rush. With lyrical prose and a clear-eyed distaste for the hagiographic stories of pioneers and prospectors that comprise much of popular California history, Zhang weaves together themes of sacrifice, reinvention, and the debt that comes along with the immigrant experience. How Much of These Hills is Gold is available now. (I paid for my own copy.)
The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin — A very different kind of American myth than those referenced above. In this painstakingly researched book, Josh Levin expands his Slate series on Linda Taylor, the inspiration for Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” anecdote. It’s an interesting social history of how right-wing populists have used race-baiting stereotypes to justify cuts to the social safety net, but it is also - and I cannot stress this enough - an absolutely wild ride from start to finish. Welfare fraud was the least of Linda Taylor’s crimes, which also encompassed burglary, kidnapping and child trafficking, and possibly murder. If you liked Bad Blood or Billion Dollar Whale and have nothing good to say about Ronald Reagan, The Queen is for you. (I paid for my own copy.)
Thanks for reading! As always, you can reply to this email or find me on Twitter with questions, comments, complaints, or recommendations.