Book Review: “The Morningside” by Téa Obreht
Fables of the Reconstruction
Here’s a fun fact: When I lived in Toronto, Canada, as a toddler, the street I grew up on was named Morningside Avenue. So, I must admit that the reason I chose this book for review was because of that. Surely, I felt, I could revel in some kind of nostalgia for my innocent youth before I became something of a hellraiser as a pre-teen. Well, as it would turn out, The Morningside is a novel about nostalgia, but of the unremembered kind. The book is set in the world after a war and climate change has decimated it, and its characters have gone through unspeakable horrors as a result. What is remembered is the stuff of sentimentality, it turns out: boys rapping in the streets and getting free apricots from fruit vendors as a child. However, I’m perhaps getting ahead of myself. The Morningside, as written by author Téa Obreht, is a kind of magic realist fable of the life of an 11-year-old girl named Silvia. Told from her point-of-view, the novel is a meditation on death and resurrection, and of fantasies that take the place of harsh realities.
The book is set in the near future in a burg called Island City (that does, indeed, sit on an island). Silvia and her mother have settled in a run-down apartment building called the Morningside as part of a repopulation program for refugees needing homes in a decimated environment. Silvia’s mother (why does this remind me of a Dr. Hook song?) takes a job as the building’s superintendent while Sil herself awaits word on what school she will attend (if any). Any bits of information Sil has about her mother’s past life come from her aunt Ena, who regales Silvia with tales of her family and life in the city that are folksy. Ena tells Silvia, for instance, that the mysterious woman named Bezi Duras, who lives on the penthouse floor and how leaves with her dogs every night, is a witch who turns her dogs into men during the day. When Ena dies (early in the book), Silvia takes it upon herself to find out if the tales are true, with seemingly disastrous results. In the process, she befriends a Black gentleman and a girl about her age who moves into the Morningside and seems willing to unlock its secrets with Sil.
On the surface, The Morningside scans as one of those books meant just for me. I’m a big fan of magic realist fiction or anything that’s a little slipstream or weird — and to that end, this novel doesn’t disappoint. However, it might have been a tad too weird for my liking. The book doesn’t start to cohere until its final quarter, at which point the tone that takes over is a bit on the sentimental and sorrowful side. It’s the ending that makes The Morningside what it is (and, don’t worry, I’m going to try to not say too much about it to not spoil it). The other thing that niggles at me is that Silvia is presented as someone who is an old soul: she comes across as too scheming to be a true 11-year-old and her lies and her interior thoughts appear to be the mark of someone much older. (That said, the entire novel is told as a giant flashback, so there’s that.) Yet another niggling thing is that the novel is set in near future Manhattan, which I didn’t see at all — I imagined it taking place off the western coast of Florida for some reason, so this should have been brought up in the novel proper and not the publicity notes. Still, some will be enchanted by this tale, which is about unlikely friendships and the gruesome effects of a changing environment — and the effects that have on human behaviour. There’s a lot that could be unpacked about the book, but doing so risks spoiling it. And this is a book that works best knowing as little about it as possible before reading it. (So what are you doing reading me? Go out and peruse this title for yourself! Well, okay, I’m kidding there. Kind of. Sort of.)
All in all, The Morningside will make readers nostalgic for a world they weren’t even born into, even if that’s a world sometimes fraught with pain and hardship. This is a novel about navigating life in the face of human-made disaster, even if some of that human-made disaster is the stuff of totalitarian regimes. It turns out there’s a reason why certain stories aren’t told to Silvia and why fantasies may be all that will be bequeathed to her. However, again, I may be saying too much there. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of thought that went into the construction of the world of The Morningside, and you can see why its author won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. It takes verve for someone to tell a story such as this and make it work, and while this does have its deficiencies (but doesn’t every novel?), there is some crackling good storytelling going on by the novel’s close. If you like speculative fiction that doesn’t fall too hard on the speculative side, you’ll probably enjoy this. At least, as much as I did. Now I suppose I’ll go back to thinking about my early childhood and living on a certain street!
Téa Obreht’s The Morningside was published by Random House on March 19, 2024.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
