One of the great mysteries of the human species is how the arrangement of letters on a page — and then letters into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into novels — can spark such intense reactions in readers. It shouldn’t work that way. We know the whole shebang is fake, created out of the writer’s imagination. So why waste our sympathy?
Yet sometimes, magically, it does work that way.
By the time you get to the end of “The Year We Left Home,” the startlingly good novel by Jean Thompson that will be published this week by Simon & Schuster, you may forget that the characters don’t really exist, that the Iowa farm family so expertly drawn by the author never drew breath themselves, that most of the events that transpire across the book’s three-decade span aren’t part of the historical record.
The “most of” hedge is necessary because Thompson, formerly a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who still lives in Urbana, includes some actual events from the last third of the 20th century, such as the Vietnam War and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Such events give “The Year We Left Home” even more emotional resonance, because the characters are reacting to some of the same shocks and traumas that rocked the real world.
Mostly, though, the novel is about fictional episodes and made-up people — people whom we nonetheless come to pity, to root for, to grow tired of, to expect more from, to want better for, to celebrate, to mourn.
“The Year We Left Home” is a family saga, which means that lots of different folks get their say at various times, just like in most families. It starts in 1973 and moves forward along with its characters, with people such as Ryan, a young man who wants to get the heck out of Iowa, and his sister Anita, who at the novel’s inception is marrying a smooth talker named Jeff, whom Ryan doesn’t much like. Jeff, Ryan notes, is one of those shallow, go-getter types, “all fake smiles and manly handshakes.” Jeff is different from the friends and relatives among whom Ryan and Anita grew up, the reliable, hard-working Iowa farmers who till land that has been in the family for generations.
Thompson’s prose is smart and sharp but never showy. She’s not one of those preening writers who brings the narrative to a dead stop so that she can prove how clever she is by inserting a much-fussed-over metaphor. Instead, her descriptions do their work quietly and effectively — like Iowa farmers.
A character visits Las Vegas and looks around: “The open doors of the lounge led directly out to the casino floor, where people crowded around the gaming tables and slots, everyone milling and pushing, like hell’s own idea of fun.”
Yet what truly distinguishes “The Year We Left Home” is the same quality found in so much of Thompson’s work, work that has included, year after year, a reliably fine harvest of short stories. It is her ability to create a fictional world linked to the real one by threads of feeling. Midway through the novel, a character fathers a daughter, and the author’s description of his reaction to the little girl’s cry of “Daddy!” is brilliant and true:
“He was sought after, importuned, courted. His complete and constant attention was necessary to her happiness. She had silky hair the color of honey that might in time turn into his blond, or his wife’s darker shade. Her eyes were blue, their lashes damp and spiky, her skin a perfect layer of bloom. He had never imagined loving anything as entirely, as violently, as he loved her. … But she would grow beyond them and into the wider world, and at some point he would become more and more the background of her life.”
Most heartaches come not from the grand, operatic tragedies, but from the simple, inexorable changes wrought by time: Children grow up, parents grow old, people die. In making us care about things that never really happened, the best fiction provides a kind of advance solace for what we know will occur — regret, disappointment, loss — in our actual lives, the ones that take place on the other side of the page.
Twitter @litkell