‘Morningside’ in America, or Somewhere

Téa Obreht’s new novel The Morningside exists at the blur where speculative fiction shades into just “fiction.” Featuring the 33-story apartment building that gives the novel its name, The Morningside takes place in a near future where climate change is eroding human society and displaced populations are the norm. But the flooding that isolates the neighborhoods shrinks the stage for the novel’s haunting drama.

The action takes place in a few blocks fluidly defined by fogs that block the view and tides that flood the streets, focusing the reader’s attention on the small cast of characters. And, despite the claustrophobia of the era and location, for the vast majority of this coming-of-age novel The Morningside is a taut and satisfyingly rich evocation of a situation just beyond the rules of the here-and-now but also not quite subject to science fiction or magic.

Told by Silvia, the novel recounts her story from when she arrives as an 11-year-old with her mother at the building where her aunt Ena is the super. Ena is a lesbian exiled from a homophobic homeland that sounds a lot like Obreht’s Yugoslavia. Sil and her mother also fled from there, but as representatives of the later, larger refugee population that fled the “war.” Part of the Repopulation Program, they’re resettling in Island City: nominally though not actually matching with jobs and  schools.

The city surrounding the building is a shadow of its former self: flooded, crumbling, dilapidated. The promise of a reawakening of the city motivates the population as do the spikey entitlements of the long-term residents some to physical comfort, some to habits of behavior, others to cultural ownership of the history and tropes of the city. With sparing lines, Obreht draws characters that inhabit spaces like familiar spirits.

Sil finds herself caught between her culture’s superstitions and the brutal logic of survival. Traumatized by her repeated escapes from war and refugee zones, Sil’s mother is extremely closed, suspicious, and preternaturally defensive about revealing anything about her past. Though her mother has limited ability in the local language, she uses it to the exclusion of any other in public, and forbids Sil from speaking “Our” language except behind closed doors in case it reveals too much about her provenance.

Indeed, the decisive move in the narrative comes after Sil — with all good intentions — breaks that cardinal rule. Shared knowledge destroys the careful superstitions that she has employed to protect herself, the folk wisdoms she learned from her aunt and family, and her childish compulsions to deploy amulets towards a karmic balance of protection. Once she betrays any knowledge beyond their last stop in Paraiso, Sil has opened up her mother and herself to the dangers of the world.

Her only friend, Mila who moves into the 32nd floor; the mysterious, almost supernaturally powerful, artist Bezi Duras who lives in the 33rd floor penthouse with her three huge dogs; and Lewis May, the bookish snooper who was the super before Ena round out the entire cast. To the benefit of the novel and, perhaps to Sil’s benefit too, those three break the careful lines of protection around Sil and her mother that have joined the wards they laid down. Agency and adulthood come tumbling upon one another and the rigid bonds of mother-daughter relations experience severe stress that relent in the novel’s coda.

Having spent nearly 20 years living in the Morningside neighborhood of New York, I was easily able to imagine the events of the novel taking place there, but the novel’s dreamlike sense of place would make sense to anyone who has spent time in any modern metropolis. Behind the material science of any old high-rise there’s always a mumbled spell of hope or protection. Sil grows up in a future where science and magic are crumbling into one another.

Obreht said that she wrote the novel “in the hazy half-dream of pregnancy and early motherhood” and it’s easy to think of Sil’s mother’s later musings as Obreht’s own.

“Your kids won’t find peace or happiness in the things you had… You’ll find yourself telling them about your youth and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. … [you’ll] have to explain how elevators worked. Or trains or something. And that’s all right. They’ll be all right, just as you’ve been. Here or back in Paraiso—or on the moon, hell, I don’t know. The past is immense.”