This was a book that I just didn’t “get.” To gain some understanding, I poured through reviews. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and scores of other journalistic sites raved about it, many putting The Furrows on their lists of top books in 2022. I’ll give you a quick summary and then try to explain why I found this book so challenging.
Part I of the book begins with 12-year-old Casandra (“Cee” or “C”) witnessing her 7-year-old brother, Wayne drowns at the beach, but his body is never found. The family struggles with his death, especially her mother who refuses to accept that he is dead. She eventually establishes a foundation for missing children, Vigil, where Cee, now an adult, works fundraising for the organization. Her parents get divorced, and her father moves away to start another family. Throughout Part I Cee retells Wayne’s death in different accidents. As an adult, Cee feels Wayne’s presence through dreams and in the faces of random people she encounters. I found the retellings of Wayne’s death and his ‘siting’s’ confusing. Is this a sci-fi novel? An exploration of grief?
Then in Part II, we meet Will whose real name is Wayne. Will has had a much rougher upbringing that Cee. He spent years in foster care and his 8th grade doppelganger and antagonist, sets him up and gets him sent to juvenile detention. This derails his life and by the time he meets C, he is convinced that her brother Wayne was his torturer. He pursues a relationship with C in order find out where Wayne is.
See how confusing this gets? Is Wayne alive? Which Wayne? What is purpose of Will’s backstory? I understand that the novel is an exploration of grief and suffering, wishing for someone to be alive and trying to find a piece of them in your own life. But the author uses so many writing styles to do this. Her writing is amazingly beautiful, and I appreciated her poetic imagery. I was hoping the ending would bring it all together, and it almost does.
The enthusiastic reviews made me wonder if I didn’t appreciate the book because I haven’t experienced the deep grief of losing someone so close to me. Although my second daughter, Erin, died as an infant, it was anticipated, and she was only 8 weeks old. Her death was unbelievably hard, but I didn’t experience the grief described in this book.
The author purposely chose to write in multiple styles and voices. The reviews kept using the term “experimental writing” which I had to look up. Basically, it means the writer breaks conventions of narrative structure, format, or really anything the writer chooses. And while I have enjoyed unconventional novels (Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid), I found The Furrows confusing and unsatisfying.
Please let me know if you read it and feel differently. And if anyone can explain why she choose the ending she did, let me know.
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