tea obreht

Inland is Tea Obreht’s second novel. Most of you will remember that her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, received literary acclaim. I must admit that though there were elements of her first novel that I appreciated, it seemed that her attempt to meld folklore and reality into one story — difficult for any author to achieve — was a bit rocky and lacked cohesion. I was left feeling that even though the story was good, that one particular aspect was more distracting.

I wasn’t far into Inland before one character was seeing the dead, another was claiming to communicate with them, and a third was conversing with a dead child. My initial impression was not hopeful, yet I was sufficiently engaged to keep reading. The pay-off was not far away; soon the story organically brought me to consider the possibility of the dead cohabitating with the living.

Please don’t misunderstand; Inland is not a book just about the occult or mysticism. It is a modern-day Western that includes perspectives from all the early settlers of various backgrounds and ethnicities. One of the main characters, Nora, is a woman who has to deal with harsh daily life in the post-Civil War Arizona territory. The other main character, Lurie, is an outlaw Turk who evades the law while traveling the West on a camel (yes, there really were camels in the West after the Civil War). There are also Mexicans and Native Americans. Cowboys? A few, but this time they aren’t necessarily the good guys.

How do these two characters end up in the same book? It doesn’t seem likely, but Obreht pulls off this part of the storyline as well. Nora is a homestead housewife raising three children, plus her husband’s niece, under extremely harsh conditions. Her husband’s recent absence is complicating circumstances. As the novel continues, it becomes apparent that Nora has contentious relationships with just about everyone around her. A primary source of irritation: Josie, her husband’s niece, who claims to communicate with the dead. Nora is skeptical of Josie’s “talent” and refuses to allow her to hold seances in her home, while Nora herself has a running commentary with her dead daughter, Evelyn.

Lurie was orphaned as a young boy not long after arriving in America with his father. He remembers very little of his father and knows even less of his heritage. After meeting Jolly, a cameleer, some of the pieces of his past begin to fall into place. Lurie, however, is running from the law, and can’t stay in one place for long. He absconds with his beloved camel and ventures across the West for decades, his storyline finally merging with Nora’s near the end of the novel.

Inland provides us with a non-traditional perspective on life in the early American West that, despite incorporating a little fantasy, is probably a much more accurate depiction of history than we are accustomed to seeing. Obreht has developed her talent to also provide a compelling and innovative tale.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for providing an advance copy of this book in return for my unbiased review.

For more information on camels in the West, check out this article in the Smithsonian Magazine.