AMERICAN STILL LIFE

In Naremore’s novel, a talented photographer must confront her painful personal history when she returns to the town where she went to high school.

Readers meet the curiously-named Skade Felsdottir (rhymes with “shade,” she tells a police officer) as she is crisscrossing America’s highways in her ancient Jeep Wagoneer. Skade’s apparent destitution is confusing, at first, as she is a highly sought-after photographer—so much so, in fact, that she has recently won the Klausterman Prize, an honor that carries the additional benefit of a fairly lucrative book deal with the venerable Chancery publishing house. But as readers spend just a few pages with Skade, they come to suspect what may be holding her back: Never more than a few minutes pass by without her reaching for a vodka bottle. She drinks everywhere she can, and even a few places she can’t, like behind the wheel of that beaten-up Wagoneer, which she has been living out of. With a scant month left before her deadline to turn in her final manuscript including all of her photos and narrative descriptions, Skade is lightyears behind where she needs to be, and the only way she can think to wrangle more time from her publisher is to photograph a set of ceremonial totem poles they’re interested in. This normally wouldn’t be so bad, but these totem poles are located in Carleton, the small town outside of Chicago where Skade attended high school. As she returns to her old haunts, readers come to understand that her drinking may have taken root here after a horrible (and especially bloody) accident on the road that she yearns to forget. Skade reconnects with an old boyfriend (though she knows better) and meets Kit, a young woman whose own trajectory shares striking commonalities with Skade’s troubled past.

Naremore’s novel tells, in some ways, a familiar story: A struggling protagonist returns to her hometown, where she is forced to settle with the demons of her past. But the author’s keen powers of description make the novel feel fresh: “She was a needle pulling stitches across a gas station road atlas of America… Her sutures ran roughly along the line where the names began to change from things like Manatoc and Muskeegum and Oswego and Kankakee—to Fortville and Columbus and English and Whitestown”. Such sweeping, gripping descriptions of the American landscape are pleasingly commonplace here, and, together with the descansos that Skade photographs, they establish a noir-ish, pastoral flavor to Naremore’s setting that feels both new and authentic. Skade is a character who readers haven’t met before and will want to spend time with, her troubling alcoholism aside—one can’t help but be taken with a woman who, hungover to the gills and without a clean swimsuit, simply decides to hop the fence of the closed motel pool and swim in her underwear amongst the floating husks of junebugs and the buzzing of hungry mosquitoes. Readers, too, will put up with any small nuisances to stick with Naremore’s seductive narrative.

A gripping tale of a troubled artist and her forced homecoming, replete with American pathos.