There are many moving parts in The New Earth, and it's to Row's immense credit that it's not difficult to keep up with him. Frantically needing to get in touch, then not calling for weeks, months.' (The novel mostly takes place in 2018, when President Donald Trump was scapegoating immigrants to anyone who would listen.) This proves difficult: Sandy and Naomi have reached a possible point of no return in their estrangement, and Patrick is typically cagey: as Winter says, he's 'a person of obscure motives, maybe even to himself.

The frame of the story in The New Earth is Winter's attempts to gather all of the living Wilcoxes to celebrate her wedding to Zeno, who has overstayed his visa and is in danger of being deported. Following her slaying, Patrick, who had a close relationship with his Bering - although a deeply troubling one - becomes a monk in Nepal, and doesn't speak to his family for three years. Two years after that, Bering, the youngest of the clan and a peace activist, is killed by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank. 'That's what made the lie so painful, honestly, it was that she robbed us of this aspect of who we were, because she was ashamed of it, and then that transferred the shame onto us,' Winter explains to her fiancé, Zeno, a construction worker from Mexico. When the children were young adults, Naomi finally revealed to them that her biological father was Black the kids had been raised white and Jewish. She's made her peace, kind of, with her separation from her husband, and now lives with her new partner, Tilda, who works at an oceanographic institution.īoth Sandy and Naomi, as well as their two surviving children, Patrick and Winter, are haunted by the past. Naomi is living in Woods Hole, Massachusetts a geophysicist, she's on extended research leave from Columbia University. He reconsiders, but ends up making another rash decision, abandoning his job as a lawyer and moving to Vermont, where he and his wife, Naomi, converted a house into a Zen Buddhist temple 40 years before. It's a stunning book, a high-wire balancing act that tries to do a lot - and succeeds.Įarly in the novel, the patriarch of the family, Sandy, plans to kill himself by jumping off the balcony of his New York apartment. Those five unhappy minds are the focus of The New Earth, Row's novel about an American family that has imploded, one that's broken, possibly irretrievably.

Embassy row books