Tea Obreht’s “Inland” follows “The Tiger’s Wife,” her mesmerizing 2011 debut in which the author wedded a contemporary story and the cruel realities of the Balkans to legend and the paranormal. Grounded in the ages and folklore, it was a magnificent accomplishment, winner of Britain’s Orange Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. “Inland” is set in the 19th century American Southwest, and though it also possesses a permeable membrane between the living and dead, the rational and fantastic, it is less enriched by cultural history.
The novel proceeds along two alternating storylines. The first is that of a boy, later man, eventually called Lurie, who emigrates with his father from a Balkan country at the age of 6. Soon orphaned, Lurie is sent West as a delinquent and finds fast friends in Hobb Mattie, an inveterate thief, and his brother, Donovan. Hobb dies, but hangs around — as the shades of the dead tend to around Lurie — prompting the boy to continue his unappeasable pilfering ways. Donovan, Lurie and a couple of Mattie relatives form a robber gang, running afoul of Marshall John Berger, a nemesis.
Shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, Lurie attaches himself to a contingent of the U.S. Army’s Camel Corps. From there he is launched upon a series of further adventures throughout the Southwest. We learn all this and what follows from Lurie himself who is laying it out — with a good deal of initial obscurity — for a long-unidentified someone he calls “you” and, at times, “Burke.”
The novel’s other storyline belongs to Nora Lark, 37, a woman of Slovenian stock living on a settler’s claim, a “scald of earth” in drought-stricken Arizona in 1893. She is married to Emmett, a dreamer who, in addition to the failing farm, runs a small-town newspaper. The couple have three sons. Their daughter Evelyn died as an infant in circumstances brought on by fear and misjudgment. Dead though she is, Evelyn is growing into a young woman in her mother’s head, speaking to her often with common sense advice.
