Commentary |

on Zorrie, a novel by Laird Hunt

There’s a too-good-to-check quotation, usually attributed to John Gardner, that says there are only two plots in fiction: a stranger comes to town, and a hero goes on a journey. Even if Gardner never said it, the appeal of the quote is obvious. Our brains are wired to admire plots that seek adventure, that transport us to a different place. In that regard, the two plots are really just inversions of the same plot. Person goes from one place to another; change ensues.

Laird Hunt’s ninth novel, the meditative, eerie, and beautiful Zorrie, is a journey story — in some ways an echo of his 2014 novel, Neverhome, about a young woman who disguises herself as a man to fight in the Civil War. But Hunt also tinkers with our expectations from such a story, turning it from an adventure tale into an elliptical, more questioning book about why we move in the first place. Its heroine, Zorrie Underwood, is an orphan raised in rural Indiana by a stiff and humorless aunt who demonstrates enthusiasm for her charge only when she stays on task: “Something like a gleam, a little bit of breath on a little bit of near-burned-out coal, would enter the old woman’s eye whenever Zorrie would finish a job quickly and start another one.” Although we know Zorrie is highly intelligent, circumstances have cut her off from anything resembling ambition. Then the aunt dies. Zorrie is alone, but free.

Needing work, young Zorrie (she’s 21 in 1930), heads west until she arrives in Ottawa, Illinois, where she’s directed to a factory where a sign reads “Hardworking Girls Wanted.” Hunt’s touch here is so gentle, and the sign such a perfect fit for the desperate hero, that we can almost hold off our sense of the cruel, ironic twist that’s surely coming.

And alas, the factory that needs so many hardworking girls is operated by the Radium Dial Company, which for much of the early half of the 20th century employed young women to use radioactive paint to illuminate clock faces. It’s a deathtrap, but the pay was much better than any other nearby job could offer a young unskilled woman, and Zorrie enjoys the camaraderie of her coworkers, becoming part of a triad with two other women. When they go to the movies, they glow in the dark. They call themselves “ghost girls.”

At that point, the unadorned prose Hunt deploys begins to feel deliberately wobbly, a poor fit for the tragedy that’s soon to come in this short novel. (Ottawa is the center of horrid, toxic legacy, well-documented in books by Claudia Clark and Kate Moore, as well as Carole Langer’s excellent 1987 documentary, Radium City.) The novel’s simplicity, at first inviting, becomes disarming. Zorrie is living a life that we know will be shortened. And within that life, crises accumulate. After returning to Indiana after two months, she marries a farmer, Harold. They attempt to have a baby, but the radium prompts a miscarriage. After Harold dies during World War II, Zorrie is left in the orbit of her neighboring farmers.

Here, about halfway through the novel, Hunt further undoes the trusswork of a journey tale. The novel undergoes a tonal shift that turns a placidly told story with undertones of tragedy into something more dreamlike. The language becomes more ethereal and suggestive, and the sentences stretch out:

“The crisply chiseled tale of time told by the clocks and watches she had once helped paint faces for came to seem complicit in the agonized unfolding of her grief, so that soon the farm and the surrounding fields and the endless ark of change that enclosed them were the only timepiece whose hour strokes she could abide.”

Themes of madness enter the story. A neighboring farm is occupied by Virgil, a well-read, classics-quoting man whose son, Noah, has been struck all but silent after his wife, Opal, was institutionalized for setting fire to their home. Noah has ghostlike qualities that mirror his wife’s absence and Zorrie’s irradiated body: “His hands and face threw off more light than anyone else’s,” Hunt writes. Zorrie imagines him “with his head full of smoke.”

It’s as if a Marilynne Robinson novel got microdosed. Zorrie is a companion piece to Hunt’s 2003 novel, Indiana, Indiana, which tracked the stormclouded mind of Noah in his latter days. There, the style and dream imagery suggested a heartland variant of Modernism — the stranger on a journey was heading from central Indiana to a lyrical oblivion. The new novel is more firmly realistic, its sense of an eroding path more subtle. Zorrie’s interactions with others become fraught and nightmarish. When she pays a polite visit to Opal in the institution, bearing a jar of blueberries, it’s as if Opal’s very body takes possession of the gift: “Her eyes were a darker blue than Zorrie had ever seen in a face, as dark as the ripe berries she had brought, and they didn’t seem to blink … It looked like she had blueberries in her eye sockets instead of pupils.”

Toward the end of the novel, Zorrie leaves one more time, going on a package trip to Holland, where her husband was shot down during the war. The highlight of her trip is a visit to the Anne Frank House. Everything is off about this, as journeys go: The trip is practically the opposite of freedom, suffused with reminders of life cut short. But afterward, Zorrie is infused with a kind of glow, melancholy but not toxic: “The body was a beautiful mechanism, and part of that beauty lay in its precariousness, its finitude,” Laird writes. Zorrie’s journeys have led only to dead ends; they were hollow, as “experiences” go. Should she ever have left? Our possibilities for freedom, Hunt suggests, might have been as close as home, as near as our own minds.

 

[Published by Bloomsbury on February 9, 2021, 17pages, $26.00 hardcover]

 

Contributor
Mark Athitakis

Mark Athitakis is a reviewer in Phoenix who has reviewed for many publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The New Midwest, a survey of contemporary fiction from the region. He is a contributing editor of On The Seawall.

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