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Claire Messud Writes Novels for a Different Century
This Strange Eventful History is the kind of generation-spanning family story that doesn’t really get published anymore. Does it still work?
In the past couple of years, we’ve had the best-selling, Oprah-endorsed The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese; Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, the subject of much critical attention; and the Booker-nominated The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. Rather than that genre’s sidelong irony and everyday language, which lets you slip in and out as though checking on a text chain, it is earnest, rigorous, and indebted to modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; you could call it a professor’s novel (she teaches at Harvard). The idealized notion of that life before the interruptions of war and colonial expulsion is a family myth that has the power to disfigure the younger generation, who are crushed by the fact that they can’t access their supposed homeland or the easy happiness of their parents.
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