Téa Obreht’s novel Inland is set in Arizona during the second half of the 19th century. But just as she stretched the usual boundaries of realism in her 2011 novel The Tiger’s Wife about conflict in her native Yugoslavia, in Inland she offers her own version of the mythic narratives of the American West.
The story begins with Lurie who, like Obreht, arrives in America from the Balkans and now recounts his immigration by ship. After being orphaned, he begins an overland journey across America. He first wanders with a gang of outlaws, then joins the “U.S. Camel Corps,” a true-life outfit of camels and men that helped Lieutenant Edward Beale, in the late 1850s, scout and build a wagon trail from Fort Smith, Arkansas to Los Angeles. Even in company, Lurie seems to travel alone, for his deepest and longest held attachments are to Burke, his camel, and to dead people whose phantom bodies he perceives and whose “wants” he can feel and by proxy satiate.
Nora, in a parallel narrative, fights to save her family and their drought-strickenArizona Territory homestead from a self-titled “cattle king” who would doom the nearby town to ghosthood by relocating the county seat to Ash River, a town that, in effect, he owns. Like Lurie, Nora perceives the dead, but in her case it’s just one person — her daughter who died as an infant and who converses with her as the seventeen-year-old she would now have grown to be. Another creature haunts her land — a mysterious “beast” spotted by her youngest son and her husband’s psychic cousin.
Lurie’s narrative spans the continent and the decades before, during, and after the Civil War. Nora’s takes place on her farm and its environs over the course of a single day in the blazing dry summer of 1893. Memories and flashbacks extend her day into what seems like years.
Born in Belgrade, Obreht has noted the paradox of her reactions on first visiting the American West. “I felt, bizarrely, and at last, how I’d always imagined the draw of ‘home,’” she said. “I knew this was the reigning tension of the Western [film]: the ancient wilderness draws the longing outsider, inevitably to the demise of both itself and the people who called it home for thousands of years. What a strange thing, to know this and yet feel so overwhelmingly bound to a place where I had no connection, no roots, no family, no cultural touchstone whatsoever.” She does, of course, have a cultural touchstone to the American West, shared by millions all over the world: Western films that fascinated her as a child and showed her, as she says, “a landscape of the imagination more than anything else, a painted backdrop, the mirage of another age.”
Historically, the novel is well-founded, with real-life figures, including Beale and members of his Camel Corps, cast as many of the secondary characters. While true to facts, Obreht is equally loyal to her imagination, the cinematic dream of the West. Inland’s places grip their inhabitants in the dislocations and mergings of history and myth.
Obreht’s West is as harsh as that of contemporary mythmakers Cormac McCarthy and Robert Olmstead. But unlike those writers, Obreht doesn’t employ extreme violence just to stir up the reader. Also, she has no interest in the accoutrements of vintage and not-so-vintage Western films: six-guns, battle charges, bloody scalps, shoot-outs, horses rearing only to tumble kicking in a cloud of dust. The violence here is more personal; Obreht’s people are subjected to murder, mayhem, and slaughter, living as they do on the far edge of legal and social inhibitions. But much of the most intense action, especially in Nora’s narrative, is told by the characters to each other rather than enacted as a scene. Obreht doesn’t build her scenes on action. Even in violent moments, the violence is muted. Rather than blood and gore, the innards she shows us are those of the human spirit. Her intention is to take us inland.
Outwardly, “inland” defines the places that lie far from water and fellow settlers. Inland, there are no roads or railroads, no law and order, “no stage route, no postmaster, no sheriff, no stock association,” as Crace, the cattle king puts it. If there’s water, it comes in a crushing, sudden cascade, from “whatever place underground all rivers sleep.” Inland is wilderness and its native inhabitants — Comanches, Kiowa, Sioux, Apaches — arouse terror and hatred in the settlers. (That prejudice carries a fatal weight of its own.) Humans can’t survive inland. Therefore, it must be tamed.
On the day of Nora’s narrative, she is skirting inland. Her husband is gone; her two grown sons soon disappear. She’s left with dependents — her youngest son, her husband’s immobile and mute grandmother, and his cousin, a young woman whose psychic abilities don’t extend to useful predictions of weather and drought, and who is worse than useless with house and farm chores. The well’s gone dry. The husband was supposed to be back with water three days ago. Nora gets thirstier and thirstier. She draws closer and closer to her daughter’s ghost.
Lurie has his camel to carry him across country and through the years, but riding a creature so well equipped to endure the desert has its own hazards: it can take him dangerously far inland.
Nora and Lurie are powerless to decide whether or not to stay or leave where fate drop them. They are not the politicians who decide which town will thrive or disappear. They have nothing to do with the whims of men who buy legions of cattle, towns and their newspaper, miles of iron rail. Lurie is bound to wander in order to evade justice for a crime he committed in his youth. His antagonist, an upright lawman, won’t relinquish his quarry to any statute of limitations. Nora is bound to the farm, not only financially but by her daughter’s ghost.
In American folklore. ghosts usually resemble the living but are weakened and wispy. Inland’s ghosts keep the tradition, with their own twist. They see the living and, from Lurie’s point of view, try to infuse them with their “wants.” Lurie, for example, is compelled by the ghost of a fellow gang member to steal trinkets that tickle its “want.” Wisely, Lurie tries to avoid direct contact with the dead, wary of them “getting their want into him,” for once the want is in, it’s hard to resist. Being a disorderly soul, he’s not always successful.
But Nora’s ghost isn’t a phantom filled with longing for what human contact may provide. Her ghost converses with her. Evelyn, ghost-grown into a young woman, is the only one Nora can rely on to listen to her and to say what she needs to hear. Lurie’s and Nora’s ghosts are too convincing to be dismissed as mere psychological projections, though Nora does entertain that possibility. What make the ghosts real is the contrast with the living. A person living, in Inland, is not so much a vital body, for even ghosts retain some bodily form after death. The living are distinguished from the dead by the fact that they’re interdependent, emotionally and physically. The thin sustenance of the dead must come from the living; they can’t get it from each other. In gazing at a crowd of massacred people, Lurie realizes, “Suddenly, the gruesome way they had fallen seemed the least mournful thing about this place. They could see the living, but not one another. Nameless and unburied, turned out suddenly into that darkness, they rose to find themselves entirely alone.” Inland is solitude, isolation. It’s a place of want but no sustenance.
Inland demands the reader’s close attention, not only because its texture is intricate, and even a small detail may reveal an important plot point. Simply put, Obreht’s prose is beautiful. For example, a roustabout fluidly takes form as a poet-philosopher without losing the authenticity of his voice. Below, Lurie reflects on his entry into the Camel Corps:
My first day in the saddle, sickened by your rolling, I looked down at our many legged shadow running out over the sage, lengthening in the dying sun, and found my throat gone tight. It struck me, without doubt, that I had somehow wanted my way into a marvel that had never before befallen this world. And I was lonesome for my father, and for Hobb and Donovan, and for all the flickers of my life before, which seemed to be receding from me now in the wake of this consuming and incredible turn to which they had all led.
Inland is a work of great power and accomplishment, proof that Obreht has the talent and discipline to produce literary work ever more profound and artful as the years go by.
[Published on August 13, 2019 by Random House, 384 pages, $27.00 hardcover]