THE WILDERNESS

A web of friendship among millennial Black women stretches across several decades.

Desiree, Nakia, January, and Monique grew up together. They haven’t all known each other since childhood, but they came into adulthood together, navigating the tumult of their 20s, 30s, and 40s. At the opening of Flournoy’s novel—the first since her acclaimed debut, The Turner House (2015)—Desiree is 22. The year is 2008 and she’s traveling to Zurich via Paris with her grandfather, who plans to die the next day through assisted suicide. Her grandfather is all the family she has; her mother is long dead, her father long absent, and her relationship with her older sister, Danielle, deeply strained. She feels herself adrift and without prospects, but as it turns out, Desiree’s destiny is, in large part, as the anchor of her friend group. Flournoy toggles back and forth in time and perspective across the women, a structure that makes the book feel more like linked stories than a novel with a typical narrative throughline. This enables each woman to be deeply, prismatically rendered: Monique is a librarian-turned-influencer; January is a melancholic mother of two sons; Nakia is a lesbian restaurateur. (Desiree’s sister, Danielle, receives a narrative interlude, as well.) They endure hookups and breakups, Covid-19, financial woes, careers, caregiving—“the wilderness of adult life.” It’s easy to marvel at Flournoy’s precision with character, the heart of the novel, but it’s the book’s hard look at social and political realities that give it its teeth. By setting select scenes—including the novel’s shattering climax—in the near future, Flournoy seems to warn that the violence and oppression characteristic of 21st-century American life can be mitigated only by community, care, and the families we choose.

Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn.