By its very nature,” the writer Carlos Fuentes once suggested, “the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.” Such a perspective embodies Claire Boyles’s deft and deeply rendered Appraisals. Set in and around Weld County, in northeastern Colorado, the novel—Boyles’s first, although she is also the author of Site Fidelity, a 2021 collection of short fiction—unfolds mostly in the immediate aftermath of 2008’s Great Recession. The threads it weaves together, however, cannot be so readily defined. Instead, this is a book that maps the curious and fundamentally unresolvable ways we connect and also fail to do so. Revolving around the members of a farming community on the cusp of irrevocable change, Appraisals wears its title like a signifier, a reminder that living is a process of improvisation, requiring us to assess and reassess and then reassess again.
Certainly this is the case for Maggie and Fish, the married couple who center Boyles’s narrative. Their small organic farm is at risk of failure, credit card debt ballooning with each mortgage payment, their water insufficient for their needs. “It would be near impossible,” Maggie reflects, “to grow the kinds of crops she planned without a drip irrigation system, and she needed to conserve as much water as she could. She and Fish owned just one-quarter of one New Prairie Irrigation Company water right, which was not enough actual water for even their tiny operation.” On top of that, Fish has also been laid off by the landscaping company for which he once worked, and his unemployment benefits are on the verge of running out.
Boyles understands these sorts of challenges from the ground up; she is a former sustainable farmer in Colorado, and the 10 stories in Site Fidelity occupy a similar territory, featuring characters who are out of work or living on subsistence, wrestling with the responsibilities of family and other vagaries of love. “When examined with any honesty,” the author acknowledges there, “all future indicators were bleak.”
Still, if Appraisals animates a related set of issues—among its concerns, some of which also marked its predecessor, are the perils of fracking and development, as well as the politics of water—it is no mere retread. Rather, the novel represents an expansion of Boyles’s range. As in the stories, she has an acute feel for pacing, often concluding a scene or chapter a breath or two before it might otherwise end. The effect is to place us more fully into the lives of the characters by using structure to affirm or emphasize their precarity. It also serves to remind us that life, unlike a story, doesn’t wrap up neatly, or at all. “She hadn’t realized until it was too late that there would be a last time for all of those things. She hadn’t known to mark them,” Boyles observes of Maggie’s yearning for a younger version of her teenage daughter, Ozzie. “The only consolation, really, was that the eye-rolls and headphones and angst of the current moment would eventually end that same way.”
What’s compelling about that passage is the way it intermingles longing, or displacement, with acceptance. It’s a tension that becomes the book’s most visible motif. On the one hand, Boyles’s characters—not just Maggie and Fish and Ozzie but also Maggie’s grandmother Flora and a host of other figures who circle one another with both love and a kind of wary familiarity—are burdened by debt and obligation, financial and personal. On the other, almost all of them are trying to do the best they can. That no one can quite agree on what this means is the key element deepening Appraisals. Fish presents one example: Offered a job working on an oil and gas company’s fracking project, he faces a moral reckoning, especially in regard to his organic-farmer spouse. “He was certain,” Boyles writes, “both Ozzie and Maggie would be against him taking it. He didn’t see any way he could turn it down.” When he ultimately says yes, it causes a family rift so deep that it remains, as it must, unreconciled.
And yet, what other choice does Fish have? The farm is going under; he and Maggie are unable to make the numbers work. Boyles highlights the conflict by shifting point of view throughout Appraisals, among the two of them and Flora. The triangulation adds nuance and insight while keeping resolution in suspension, if not outright doubt. Maggie, after all, may be furious at Fish for having sold out, but she also perpetrates her own transgressions, primarily around the water she needs but can’t afford. Meanwhile, she accepts her husband’s offer to pay half of the farm’s mortgage with his fracking money, even as he moves out of the house. Infidelity, we might call this, all of it, although not of the romantic sort. Rather, it is indicative of a state of being: the difficult—and often contradictory—choices adults must make.
“He did not want to be the kind of man,” Boyles writes of Fish, “who put the brakes on his wife. He’d taken the job…to make sure Maggie did not lose this farm, and he still believed that in supporting each other, they’d become happier themselves.” Maggie, for her part, continues to hold out for something different, although increasingly she finds herself beset with doubt. “She’d come,” the author informs us, “to see her body, her life, as its own geology—all her layered experiences and emotions transformed by slow, relentless time and pressure.… In order to keep her failures from calcifying like bone, she worked at excavation, her memory, however unreliable, a filter she could not turn off.”
The same, of course, might be said about any one of us, regardless of circumstance. It is hard to do what’s right. And yet, Appraisals insists, we keep on trying, even when our choices are constrained. It is not compromise itself that is the problem, since it cannot be avoided. What matters is how we respond. “There was nothing comforting to say,” Boyles writes, from the perspective of Flora. “Unfinished business was part of outliving anyone you had ever really loved.” Outliving, yes, but also living with them. Whether in memory or in the mire of daily life.
This is the wisdom, or attention, Boyles weaves into Appraisals. This is the condition the novel seeks to excavate. What may be most remarkable about the book is the inherent decency of so many of its characters, even when they are driven to make decisions they may not wish to have made. Life doesn’t care, Boyles means to remind us. We have no other choice, in the end, but to do whatever we must in order to survive. “A conversation. Not a fight, okay?” Fish says to Ozzie when he is forced to broach a difficult subject with her. This, it seems to me, is—echoing Fuentes on the novel as a gesture of becoming—only all and everything we can do.•
APPRAISALS, BY CLAIRE BOYLES
