Bernadette has temporarily parked herself at a Super 8 motel near Minneapolis in 2009. She’s there to reckon with two decisions made by her older sister, Joanne. One, twenty-two years ago in 1987, when Joanne jumped off the roof of their Illinois farm house to calamitous body breakage. She was 11 years old. Bernadette still doesn’t know what she witnessed that day. The other is Joanne’s decision to get pregnant, now, in her 30s. Bernadette mourns the change motherhood will create in their sibling relationship. “I thought we were enough,” Bernadette reflects. “I thought we were a good place to stop.”
She’s an interesting narrator in this accomplished first novel, in thrall to her older sister to the point of emotional surrender. She speaks to us with intimacy but also energetic and comedic honesty, often gasping over her sister’s unusual behavior during the years they were growing up on the farm. Joanne’s antics range from the whimsical to the illogical. There is the time she liberated farmland weeds from the assault of chemical prevention products, and the time she hosted a sperm whale drawing contest in the living room, packed with young men more interested in Joanne’s beauty than art. And then there were Joanne’s frenzied monologues in their attic bedroom, her philosophic theories and social arguments detailing the wrongs of American capitalism. The prose sparkles: Joanne is “an instigator, recalcitrant fire-breather, resolute skeptic, confident loner.”
It’s the 1980s, the era of the Midwestern farm crisis, when family farms dropped into foreclosure as swiftly as cascading dominoes. It kicked off when U.S. President Jimmy Carter embargoed grain shipped to the Soviet Union, protesting its invasion of Afghanistan. The consequences on American farmers continued through the Reagan Administration. The value of their crops plummeted. The political situation hits hard for this fictional family. Joanne and Bernadette’s father Henry slams his fist into walls; their mother Sylvia chain smokes her menthol cigarettes and calls a hotline. They drown in financial debt.
We saw our parents, however briefly, age ten years in one.
The sisters struggle to assimilate the mounting uncertainty. They lose themselves in Joanne’s predilection for the absurd, such as designing human preservation uniforms. There’s mental illness in their maternal family history, which could be the reason for Joanne’s personality, or it could be a reaction to the crisis, or both. It’s not clear. The first half of the novel becomes heavy with much description about this instability, versus impactful dramatic scenes. It goes on too long. Nevertheless, the storytelling triumphs with wit, complexity, and vivid precision.
Eventually, there’s no choice but to rent the farm house and move to Chicago. The heaviness lifts, as Bernadette attends the University of Chicago and paints rooms in the opulent house of a wealthy professor; as Henry gets a job in real estate and watches birds; as Sylvia works at a textile company. Joanne, however, unravels. She crosses the line of public involvement, freeing caged animals in pet stores and the zoo. She doesn’t improve under institutional care, so Henry, Sylvia, and Bernadette collectively decide to trust a remote location in Alaska, once a place designed for psychological healing, and there something good for Joanne becomes possible.
Nora Lange writes:
Land is a farmer’s identity, history, connection to God, a religion, and nationality of its own.
The loss of that way of life takes its toll on these characters, most evident in Joanne. In the Super 8 motel, Bernadette recognizes this, and finds a semblance of peace about her sister, and herself, understanding that Joanne’s choice of motherhood in Alaska is a desire to reach a point where there’s no going back to what came before. It’s possible Joanne is still of a mind to self-harm, as when she jumped off the roof. Bernadette suspects that possibility but doesn’t know for sure, and neither do we.
A version of this review aired on NPR member station WOSU 89.7 FM. Us Fools is published by Two Dollar Radio.
The Longest Chapter 