Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Publishes
Mar 28, 2023
592 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity's uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row
For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine's West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper.
Now, in 2018, Winter Wilcox is getting married, and her only demand is that her mother, father, and brother emerge from their self-imposed isolations and gather once more. After decades of neglecting personal and political wounds, each remaining family member must face their fractured history and decide if they can ever reconcile.
Assembling a vast chorus of voices and ideas from across the globe, Jess Row "explodes the saga from within—blows the roof off, so to speak, to let in politics, race, theory, and the narrative self-awareness that the form had seemed hell-bent on ignoring" (Jonathan Lethem). The New Earth is a commanding investigation of our deep and impossible desire to undo the injustices we have both inflicted and been forced to endure.
"Row's magisterial latest (after the essay collection White Flights) traces the complex dynamics of a New York City family on a geopolitical scale... . Moments of levity draw the reader in ... and the author pulls off many moving metafictional moments... This is Row's best work yet." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Stupendously good…. Like Franzen's The Corrections (2001), this is a family saga with a global perspective, sweeping across borders and time, from Israel to Chiapas to the northeastern U.S., from the utopian communes of the 1970s to the present, and exploring the impending climate disaster, colonialism, race, identity, and wealth, along with some metafictional musing. Each character's story is a fascinating portal into contemporary life, adding up to a deeply moving, wonderfully engaging, and truly remarkable novel of the times." —Booklist
"Jess Row interrogated American whiteness with great creative power in Your Face in Mine and White Flights. The New Earth extends his thinking on historical amnesia and erasure, race and family, in extraordinary ways." —Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
"Riveting and brilliant, The New Earth throws down a gauntlet around Jewishness, diaspora, and the historical production of whiteness in America with such tremendous force that the novel feels epochal. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the American literary landscape will be quite the same after the effects of this work are felt. A novel at once sprawling and deeply intimate, I had to stop reading many times simply to marvel at Row's creation of this family and the book that holds them." —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
This information about The New Earth was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Sonya Posmentier
Jess Row was born 1974 in Washington, D.C. He attended Yale University and graduated in 1997; he taught English for two years in Hong Kong before completing his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan in 2001.
Row is the author of the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. Named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007, he has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and has appeared in The Best American Short Stories three times.
He currently resides in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife, Sonya Posmentier. He is an assistant professor of English at The College of New Jersey and teaches in the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is also a teacher and student of Zen Buddhism.
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