#Elsewhere a novel full#

Summarizing the subsequent plot points simply doesn’t do “Elsewhere” justice. Those good vibes don’t last when the stranger forms close ties to one of the town’s residents, setting in motion the rest of the novel. It pleased us to watch her see, taste, touch all we had to offer,” writes Schaitkin. So when a stranger shows up one day, the townspeople fall all over themselves to ingratiate themselves to her. There’s a sense of comfort and peace in their town that trumps any curiosity they may have about what lies over the mountains. Phillips to arrive by train four times a year and bring them anything they can’t make or grow on their own. : Elsewhere: A Novel (9781250219626) by Schaitkin, Alexis and a great selection of similar New, Used and Collectible Books available now at. Residents of Vera’s hometown never leave except for the moms who vanish. The book’s other major theme is in the title.

#Elsewhere a novel full#

Here she is nursing her child, Iris: “How could it be that she carried the potential to make me go, or to go herself one day? For the first time, I felt the full weight of our affliction: the peril of immense loss and the power of immense love, the two forces impossible to disentangle, for they were one and the same.” Vera’s mother disappeared when she was young and as the story progresses and Vera herself gives birth, the novel takes on an eerie quality, as she wonders if she’ll be next. “A mother was a chance to hate someone as much as you loved them, caring and wounding, a push and pull that only tightened the knot that bound you,” writes Schaitkin from the perspective of her first-person narrator, Vera, a young woman growing up in a nameless, secluded mountain town, where mothers mysteriously vanish from time to time, a fact of life that everyone calls an “affliction.” Schaitkin writes trenchantly about what it means to mother, the hardships and self-doubt balanced with the beauty and love. Mothers who read it will probably nod their heads the most. “Elsewhere,” the new novel from Alexis Schaitkin (“Saint X,” 2020), is best described as a dark fairy tale, with elements of the supernatural, but with something very real to say about a topic all readers can relate to in one way or another - motherhood. This Study Guide consists of approximately 39 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Elsewhere.

Sometimes it’s fun to read something that doesn’t fit in any particular category. Elsewhere: A Novel - Part IV Summary & Analysis. Still, at this particular moment, a novel that dramatizes the perils of motherhood, and challenges the idea that it should be all-important, could not be more relevant.“Elsewhere” by Alexis Schaitkin (Celadon Books) (The local men, for instance, seem a bit too resigned to the possibility of losing their wives.) Like those oppressive clouds, the narrative is at times opaque, and perhaps some occasional humor would have provided a clarifying breeze. Even when Vera becomes an outsider herself, with a chance to gain some perspective, she doesn’t seem fully awake to the affliction’s weirdness or grow suspicious about its origins.

Although, frankly, the reader also struggles to understand the lessons of the affliction or why no one questions it. Schaitkin is at her sharpest and darkest when depicting the anxieties and self-justifications of new mothers, their fears of being judged as unnatural or inept, particularly by other mothers, the standard of maternal excellence being as impossibly high in this misty place as everywhere else. A welcome addition to a shelf of speculative fiction about the joys, failures and metamorphoses involved in having a child, Elsewhere asks: Is motherhood, like the town itself, meant to be a featureless place, best experienced under a haze of collective brainwashing? Read Full Review > Perhaps this is the real speculative element: a mother with no traces of ambivalence. Even as the plot completes a satisfying loop, Vera maintains the prejudices she had at the start and, most unusually, never questions her own certain motherhood. But such an anomaly never materializes, and even strangers still reinforce the status quo when it comes to gender roles. Readers might long for a sympathetic, perhaps child-free outlier to reimagine, this female plight and bring some semblance of resolution into focus. Schaitkin chooses to leave intact our culture’s misogyny and reproductive pressures. It’s not what Elsewhere elides but what it preserves from our world that is the most telling. Without any signifiers of location and time, Schaitkin’s narrative seems to reach for a sense of universality, and intentionality: as though every element of this carefully crafted theater has been placed there for a reason. joins the recent roster of impressive novels that have employed speculative elements to examine new motherhood.