Summary:
Dana
Spiotta is one of my favorite authors, so I was poised to read her latest
novel, Wayward, when it was published last year. As expected, it
captures the zeitgeist perfectly and is marked by Spiotta’s wide-ranging wisdom,
versatile knowledge, and literary creativity.
The
book takes place in Syracuse shortly after the election of 2016 (although Donald
Trump is never mentioned by name). Sam, the central character in the novel, feels
caught in an increasingly unsatisfying marriage. Triggered by her post-election
anxiety, she abruptly decides to leave her husband Matt and daughter Ally. On a whim, she
purchases a rundown old-style house in a poor neighborhood in Syracuse and
moves in to live as a 53-year-old woman on her own, intent on starting a new
life. Matt is disconcertingly understanding and supportive, but Ally cannot
abide her mother’s abandonment of the family. It is an unwanted distraction
from her single-minded devotion to excel in high school and to go to a top-tier
college.
Sam
works as a volunteer near her new home at a historical site that is dedicated
to Clara Loomis, a fictional woman who left her family (shades of Sam!) to join
the Oneida community, an egalitarian retreat based on equality between the
sexes but also fuzzy notions of eugenics and human breeding. Sam works
her way through some edgy women’s groups in search of friendship. She tries to
mingle with her neighbors, who are quite different than the people she
encountered in her suburban environment. But Sam’s life is complicated. She
realizes that her mother, a self-sufficient creative 80-year-old woman, is
probably dying from an undisclosed illness. She feels increasingly distant from
the daughter that she loves so intensely, a
problem that her defection to the inner city has only made worse. And Ally
has her own precocious story, a secret life, which is told from her perspective,
but which is tightly linked with her mother’s narrative of inner growth.
Sam
witnesses a police shooting of a Black adolescent, an immigrant from Somalia, while
walking near her house during a restless night. While Sam struggles to find a
way to articulate what she saw and help achieve some degree of justice for the
victim, she experiences an unexpected “assault.” No spoiler alert, except to
say that the ending gathers the narrative stands together and is quite
satisfying. It is grand in scope and affirms the value of simple human
endurance.
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