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Inland is Téa Obreht’s follow up to her 2011 award-winning debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. The novel is a historical epic that unfolds in the American West during frontier times, told from two perspectives. It switches between the voices of Herzegovinian immigrant and roaming outlaw, Lurie Mattie, and Nora, a frontierswoman and mother of three sons struggling to make a life for her family in an adverse climate. The narrators share a proclivity to communicate with the dead, Lurie can see and communicate with ghosts, while Nora has a running dialogue with the daughter she lost months after birth. Both characters are in a life or death struggle with huger and thirst, and every day is a battle to survive in the harshest of circumstances. Death suffuses the narrative, as environmental struggles set the scene for the most timeless of human quandaries, and reanimates the conquest of the American West with an air of darkness.
Like The Tiger’s Wife, this novel is preoccupied with the relationship not only between the living and the dead, but also the relationship between humans and animals. Lurie’s sections are addressed to his traveling companion, a camel named Burke. Lurie is very much attuned to Burke’s sensibilities, and often humanizes many of his characteristics. Obreht allows humanizing qualities like these to recolor her portrayal of the West, straying from the single virtue of toughness toward virtues like sensitivity, compassion, and intellect, in characterizing her frontiers-people. Nora laments that the years she has spent surviving off of the land with her husband have robbed her of her feminine qualities in the eyes of her husband. She recalls how she was once considered a lady, and how her finer virtues have been sacrificed in favor of her survival abilities. In other words, she has been hardened against her own will, and the West is a de-femininzing space where female virtues become untenable. Many reviews have called this novel a ‘reimagining’ or ‘reinventing’ of the American western, and I believe they are pinpointing this emotional impulse, and nuanced portrayal of the softer sides of toughness. Told from the perspective of a middle aged woman and an immigrant, this novel is a far cry from the ideal American male-centric westerns of the past.
However, the pacing of this novel seems to be where it runs into some trouble. By switching between narrators so suddenly, Obreht can lose her readers in terms of time period and location, and I often found myself wandering throughout the narrative. Many of Lurie’s sections can feel a bit slow and lacking in forward progress, which also made the novel feel like a bit of a challenge to get through. While the two narrators and surrounding characters feel expertly woven and sensitively portrayed, ultimately the pacing issues in this novel made it feel like a weak follow up for Obreht’s richly textured and engaging debut.