My childhood next-door neighbor, an accountant and Pacific Theater World War II veteran with a passion for fishing, did not have a massive collection of books. Even so, he kept the complete set of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series and a shelf or two of Louis L’Amour novels in a prominent place in his living room. While I assiduously devoured each of his Wilder books, my eyes glazed past his mass-market paperback Westerns. Yes, the story of a Wisconsin girl traveling west by wagon held my fascination, as did Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, but dime-store cowboy tales? Who bought into these corny stories?
Many people, apparently. But to my city dweller’s eyes, these dusty, lawless small towns felt like ancient history. I didn’t see them for what they were: an American mythology. Flash-forward from the 1990s to the present day as critic Jia Tolentino extols the virtues of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I still find it hard to reconcile the fact that his 1985 Pulitzer-winning novel could be the must-read book of the past couple of summers. So, fine, I come with my own snobbery around mythologies. How very American of me!
Unlike me, these mythologies are not lost on the writer Téa Obreht, who was born in the former Yugoslavia but now lives in Wyoming. Her acclaimed, bestselling 2011 debut, The Tiger’s Wife, weaves rich family legends resembling fables into a stark narrative of a young doctor shocked by the death of her grandfather in her war-torn Balkan homeland. Her following novels, Inland and The Morningside, chronicle an epic journey in the American West during the 19th century and an antediluvian future that signals a looming dystopia. In her new novel, Sunrise, Obreht flexes her skills as a literary writer who deploys a thriller’s pacing, the vivid description crucial for realistic historical fiction, and the steady, calm voice of a central narrator, our entry point into a multifaceted tale of abuse and generational trauma. Much of this country was founded by men who seized fortunes at any cost, and we find it hard to shake the lasting repercussions of those actions. As a conniving man states to a dying gunman late in the novel, “Inheritance…is a matter of spirit.”
Obreht is a writer who doesn’t rush into easy patterns of storytelling but seizes control from the jump. Sunrise begins with a plane crash in 2024. Rather than build up to an intense moment like this, Obreht opens the novel with a catastrophe. It’s a bold choice; after the fact, she must establish character, stakes, backstory, and the connective tissue of all these elements. She earns our confidence with flinty characters who escape easy moral stances. She is a writer who asks the reader to follow a complex examination of the truth through overlapping narratives: a survival narrative, a historical novel, an interview transcription. Confronted with loose ends, she asks herself what these desperate characters are searching for: “Peace, relief, rest?” Beyond glory or gold, Obreht mines a tale about legacies of betrayal in the American West to discover what’s truly at the heart of western expansion.
As the book sprawls forward, we learn that this shocking accident is far from the first brutal event that’s scarred the area around the Wyoming town of Sunrise. Sections of Obreht’s novel recount prior events that transpired in the same location. Over a century earlier, a band of misfits in this Western outpost stumbled upon a hostage situation and resolved the conflict in a sensational fashion. This story becomes the basis of a play whose fictionalization offers them more than just escape and glory; it is their ticket to worldwide fame, travel, and notoriety. It comes at the cost of respect and merely papers over personal conflicts that fester over time. Long after the people behind the characters have passed away, it’s unclear how to separate fact from fiction.
In 2003, Coll, an amateur historian, organizes a reenactment only to be confronted by Louise, an outsider with a novel drawn from these stories but broadened to include newly uncovered information. Coll’s local pride puts him on guard. He’s possessive of this story that’s become more personal than simply offbeat local lore. Together, the two visit Sunrise to explore what’s left behind. But the novel is never published. The new account is squashed, but Obreht is a writer who never lets a secret—or the impact of ignoring the truth—go unchecked. Time will out one way or another.
Returning to our central character from the 2024 plane accident, Nina is a young woman stuck at a crossroads. In past times, perhaps she would have struck out West to resolve matters. But in the present day, she finds herself working as a nanny for a wealthy family in Manhattan, spending most of her nights with her two young charges, avoiding a breakup with Ben, her high school boyfriend, and lacking the confidence to move ahead in a new direction. Nina cannot disentangle herself from a life fraught with the specter of her mother’s sacrifices as an immigrant and a series of poor choices that have trapped her in the relationship that ultimately leads to her being thrown out of a Cessna by Ben as they vault toward Horsebone Lake.
Sunrise presents a clear tension between unexpected violence and methodical, careful observations. There’s Nina’s steady account of her thoughts and movements, conserving energy and responding to instinct; it’s a style of narration that quietly connects the reader to the natural world as Nina recognizes that “the sun goes on melting drowsily behind the fog. Her phone reads 5:44. It’s late August. There will be light in the sky until eight, eight-thirty.” Nature is coiled together with time and instinctive awareness. And then there are her racing memories, which bleed into her subconscious while she’s alone, struggling to make sense of the isolated wilderness in which she’s found herself. Providing backstory is a convincing means of fleshing out the lives of our characters. Nina makes her way to the empty town of Sunrise under the pressure of the ticking clock of a dying smartphone and a small stash of protein bars. Will she or won’t she survive? Hers is an odyssey of recovery and escape against the backdrop of unsolved crimes and abandoned towns.
What may feel like a puzzle in these pages is in many ways an accordion. Obreht allows the stories of both the past and the present to speak for themselves as connections surface throughout the course of the book. We see how the crimes committed in one moment overlap with those of a later time. Women’s voices are overlooked and dismissed. Men barrel ahead, truth be damned, in accordance with what they see as a larger goal—power, status, money, authority. And it’s control that remains elusive for the men in Obreht’s novels. Hers are often broken, disappointed men, some facing death. Each struggles to see beyond his own concerns and petty grievances. And it’s generally a woman who attempts to set the story straight. It’s a thankless task.
But isn’t that so often the fate of the novelist? To reconcile the past through the guise of a story? Obreht distinguishes herself as a spellbinding writer who recognizes the ways that mythologies bend the truth to dazzle us with stories that capture a larger history. Sunrise is a blistering look at the mythologies we just can’t shake. Far be it from me to ever underestimate the pull of Western tales again.•
Lauren LeBlanc is a writer and critic who has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, the Oxford American, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.
