The Furrows (2022) by Namwali Serpell

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Furrows (2022)

by Namwali Serpell

Bethany Beach, Delaware *

Delaware 3/3

   Like many readers I was extremely impressed by Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell's first novel, The Old Drift (2019).   The Old Drift was hands down the best first novel I'd read for years- mixing historical fiction about a mostly ignored location (Southern Rhodesia/Zambia) with science-fiction, moving across space and time with a well detailed cast of characters- it wasn't a perfect novel, but it was an amazing FIRST novel- being neither a trauma porn take or a bildungsroman written from the perspective of a character who shares many of the author's characteristics. 

  Thus, when The Furrows was release in 2022 I was at first excited, then disappointed when I read the reviews, Serpell having moved in a different direction from book one.  If her first novel placed her in a category far beyond what is normally achieved by most authors with their first book, her second novel sounded like something most American authors would write for their first book: A dour tale about a biracial young woman who is present when her younger brother goes missing/dies in the Atlantic ocean during a summer visit.  Like many readers I was surprised that the premise here is that a seven year old and ten year old from a family with little history in the water were allowed to swim alone in the ocean without supervision. especially since the major plot dynamic is that the mother of the family never, ever gets over the disappearance/death of the younger brother.

  The Furrows is certainly an example of American literary fiction family plot type 3- child dies young and the entire family spends the rest of their life (and the book) absolutely not getting over it.  Here, the narrator and primary actor is Cassandra Williams- black dad, white mom.  She is a young adult with a good education and no career.  Her mom, a wealthy heiress (ish) living in San Francisco, has dedicated her entire life to the proposition that Cassandra's little brother is not dead, merely missing, and she's set up a non-profit to help others sharing her fate.

  Cassandra is, obviously, haunted by her missing/dead brother, and most of the book involves her running into guys named Wayne who might be her brother.  Serpell has injected a "magic realism" edge to the text, to the point where the reader is sometimes unsure if Cassandra is hallucinating or not.  At least one major event in the book- some kind of explosion at SFO is treated so obliquely that the reader doesn't know if it happened at all.

    Like many works of contemporary American literary fiction written about people from the upper echelons of the socio-economic ladder, I found the characters in The Furrows borderline insufferable. Were The Furrows Serpell's first novel, I would say it was a good first effort but not that interesting, as the book she wrote after The Old Drift, it can only be called a disappointment.