Joanne’s voice has always been in Bernadette’s head. The Fareown sisters can’t escape each other, even if they can escape their roots. Growing up on their Illinois farm in the 1980s, Jo and Bernie have learned to fend for themselves, largely by sticking together.
Their parents, distracted by the farm crisis that is burying their neighbors and much of rural America with them, spend most of their time “lovingly fondling each other like a set of keys.” The girls are restless and hungry, sick of the bland food their chain-smoking mother serves them. Instead, they devour Nietzsche and Woolf, home-schooling each other in their attic.
In “Us Fools,” Nora Lange’s tender, exquisitely funny and supremely strange debut novel about these sisters, nothing much happens. Also, everything happens. The story opens in 1987 with Jo, age 11, taking a leap from the family’s roof, to “experience falling.” She’s the charismatic older sister, prone to violence and performance art, and Bernie, our narrator, is nearly effaced by her sister’s outsize shadow. Bernie dreams of a different life, one in which she can afford vitamins and other modern luxuries, and she tries to fight the designation her sister gives them: “junk kids.” But, like most of Jo’s forceful visions, it proves irresistible.
The opening pages inform us that we are looking back at their childhood from 2009, as Bernadette holes up in a Super 8 in Bloomington, Minn., to make sense of her family’s history, “examining the contents of our lives like receipts.” The sisters are grown, and Joanne, still unpredictable as ever, wants a baby.
In between these two coordinates, we travel with the Fareowns from the farm to Chicago and then to Deadhorse, Alaska, as Bernie tries to cure herself of “love-loathing” her sister. Bernie goes to college, Jo goes to an institution. But these and other medium-size events — deaths, moves, breakups, jobs, the stuff of most novels — take place between commas. They are the clauses dependent on Bernadette’s enduring interests: grand observations and minute movements. “Back in the Midwest,” she recalls in an early chapter, “the rate of suicide rose, so too did the number of New Coke haters.”
In almost every exhilarating sentence, Lange tries to plug the vast, diseased expanse of our country’s history into this particular set of characters it has doomed: “The term ‘nuclear family’ had been installed in America like the questionable electric wiring in our house, which would fail.”
This short-circuiting substitute for plot might confound some readers conditioned to seek cause and effect. These same readers, if gathered in a creative writing workshop, might question the authenticity of a 9-year-old declaring, “We are surrounded by America with its orgies of barbarism,” or, “For identity to be realized … one must come to the place where identity dissolves.” I admit, sometimes, I’m one of these readers.
But progress and authenticity are among the myths “Us Fools” entices us to question. The Fareown sisters have made a preoccupation of defying others’ expectations of them, including their own. They’ve been underestimated and derided as much as they’ve been idealized and flattened by the urban undergrads and Hollywood actresses who insist that “Midwesterners have souls. They are the soul of America.” Bernadette has developed a deadpan shrug to this lifetime of dismissal from the coastal gentry: “Unusual temperatures were expected to reach ‘as far away as Illinois.’ That far.”
The Fareown sisters are no fools. They are smarter than most of us. They see the poison in the water, the blood in the stool, and they know we’re all complicit: “I consumed America as much as America consumed me.” This may be a story about the most painful and absurd moments of the 1980s, ’90s and aughts in our country, and it may occasionally read more like a microfiche series of Time magazine covers than history experienced. But it’s also a novel that is uniquely and urgently about and for today, mapping the uncrossable distance between the coasts and the heartland, between the America we’ve been and the America we want to be.
By the end of “Us Fools,” Bernadette’s spellbinding voice was as stuck in my head as Joanne’s is in hers. Just as the narrator resists her sister’s imperious presence, I too wrestled with the maddening magnetism of this book, its claustrophobia and contradictions; it’s an older sister with a bigger vocabulary and bigger boobs. “There were times growing up,” Bernadette says, “when I imagined ripping Jo’s heart out of her chest and draping the limp veiny organ over a wooden chair, a nice chair made of solid wood. But I would say no such thing. I kept my thoughts to myself like one wears a locket. I understood being in her presence required surrendering.”
Being with this book requires the same quiet stamina, and its reward is to witness a rapturous and rare kind of truth. Once I surrendered to it, this savage American novel consumed me, as much as I consumed it.
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