I bought Wayward on spec since I know nothing about Dana Spiotta nor anything about her writing, only that she is from Syracuse and the novel is set in Syracuse, a fact which caught my attention. It’s strange, the associations we make. From ‘66 to ‘67 my dad was in a masters program at Syracuse University (where Dana Spiotta now teaches), uprooted the family, rented out our house in Toronto, and took a townhouse in Liverpool (I think). This is the site of my earliest memories, which are sparse and scattered, like the random shots of a negligent photographer: sliding down an upturned sandbox and running my right palm across an exposed nail; a cow-jumped-over-the-moon mobile over my baby brother’s crib; a nun dressed all in black who sat down with me at the kitchen table (to practise administering an IQ test); my grandmother standing with me at an upstairs window watching children playing outside and telling me about how they were running around in sneakers (as a Canadian child, I had never heard the word sneakers until my American grandmother introduced me to it). These are seemingly trivial things, and yet they have a hold over me. I don’t think I’ve been back to Syracuse although I’ve been to places near Syracuse, like Ithaca and Watkins Glen and Corning. I suppose that means the Syracuse I remember is an imaginary place; maybe it’s an idea of what childhood is like. So I buy a book because it’s set in this imaginary place. But when I start reading the book, I find myself immersed in the story of a perimenopausal woman whose desire to leave her husband coincides with Trump’s election. Not exactly the stuff of fuzzy childhood memories.
Samantha Raymond—Sam—falls in love with a house in a sketchier part of Syracuse, and she decides to buy it and leave her husband, Matt. Fifty-three years old, one half of a well-established middle-class family unit, mother of independent-minded 16 year old Ally, Sam appears to have her shit together, so her motivation for going wayward is unclear. As far as we can discern, she appears to be afflicted by an inchoate midlife hollowness. The bare walls of the new house give Sam an opportunity to start afresh, to reimagine herself not as an idealized creature in a lifestyle magazine, but as a flesh-and-blood woman who belongs to the actual epoch she inhabits. This is the age of Donald Trump and alternate truths, of fourth wave feminism and festering cynicism, of an aspirational activism that feels hamstrung by the very tools that are supposed to empower it, of a generational gap that widens with the release of each newly designed emoji.
Sam isn’t the only one who finds a reflection of her life in the real estate she occupies. Her daughter is dating an older man. One might define their relationship in terms of game theory. The glue that binds them is not a sacred vow but mutual extortion. Ally promises not to have Joe charged with statutory rape; in return, Joe promises not to release compromising cellphone pics. Joe is a developer who repurposes historic sites as exclusive residences. He gets tax breaks and special grants for preserving the character of the site, whatever that means, while making a buck by returning the site to the marketplace. He seems like an up-and-comer who genuinely cares about things like historical integrity, but after a while his shtick wears thin. Where I live, the most common practice in Joe’s trade is facadism, the preservation of old storefronts as if they were buildings on a movie set, and their incorporation into glass and concrete towers. Facadism could also characterize Joe’s approach to relationships. Cheap plays for approval, but little of substance beyond the appealing front.
Then there is Lily, Sam’s mother who moved to a beautiful rural property in Mohawk Valley after Sam’s father died. The house is “an eccentric, rustic hippie modernist dwelling built in the seventies by a talented carpenter weirdo.” It’s in a serene location with a vegetable garden and a view of the farms in the valley below. Ideal. Except, of course, that it isn’t. Lily has been diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a cancer of the soft tissue. She has been using the relative remoteness of her home to place a distance between herself and her daughter, and to withhold from her daughter the fact that she is dying. Part of the reason for her secrecy, as with Ally’s secrecy around her relationship with Joe, is a justified fear of Sam’s unpredictable reaction. Sam will try to insert herself into their lives, control outcomes, perhaps exploit these situations as a way to compensate for the hollowness at the centre of her own life.
Houses and buildings can serve as metaphors for a more problematic enclosure, the body. Spiotta is brilliant in the way she engages the problem of embodiment, starting with the humble fact that instability lurks at the centre of our bodily existence: “There is something human—touching—in the older body, in its honest relationship to decay and time.” It’s easier for men to prolong the denial of their vulnerability. Sam’s husband—now estranged husband—seems blithely unconcerned with matters of the body. I share with Matt a certain deficit, namely the lack of a uterus, and so I have no fucking clue what happens to women as their bodies change. I persist as long as I can with my delusion that I and my universe live together in a stable state (until reality overtakes me). Perhaps, like most women, Sam is more adept at confronting her own delusions of stability and at acknowledging her frailties. By the end of the novel, she can observe: “What a thing, this out-of-control body. It made her aware of how her body was alien to her, progressing toward its decline, its next phase, regardless of her desire or collusion. Her participation was not required.”
Spiotta expands her exploration of embodiment to embrace the frailties of the body politic and, beyond that, the dire vulnerabilities of our planet, Gaia’s body. While at the gym, she observes the young men:
But beyond the futility of body gains, what amazed her was their persistent insistence on boosting the self when the world—and this country, in particular—was in disgraceful shambles. The progressing, ever-widening gulf of disparity in every sphere. And were we not also on the verge of an environmental apocalypse? People seemed more fixated than ever on notions of “self-tend, self-care, self.” In the current context, wasn’t naked pursuit of health obscene? The self-contemplation down to the microbiomic makeup of your alimentary system, yet such contemplation was divorced from any reflection.
This seemed, now more than ever, the most American of myopias, this unapologetic—boastful, even—attention to the surface self. It sort of made sense, though. A retreat to the local. The hyperlocal and controllable: your heart, your lungs, your flesh.
There is something elegiac in Spiotta’s tone. Perhaps myopia is a defence. Speaking personally, if I spent much time each day looking beyond my personal bodily concerns to view the world with clearer eyes, I would find it difficult to keep from weeping.
Roughly half way through Wayward, it occurred to me that Spiotta has created not a novel so much as a record of the American zeitgeist with its strange mix of idyllic New England towns and protofascist MAGA mobs, its glorious universities and rampant anti-intellectualism, its shining democratic institutions and its racist trigger-happy police. I asked myself: who else do I know who has made a life’s work of capturing the American zeitgeist? It came as no surprise, then, to note Don DeLillo’s name in the acknowledgements. In subtle ways, his influence lurks throughout these pages.
The chief feature of the contemporary zeitgeist which attracts Spiotta’s attention is the way our public discourse has transmogrified as it has shifted from analog to digital media. Since her split with her husband, Sam has used social media platforms to connect with feminist activists of a certain age. One of her new contacts is a local woman who goes by the initials MH. Something unspecified happens and other contacts encourage Sam to shun MH and to sign a petition against her. But when Sam asks what MH has done, no one will tell her. Instead, they assure her that there are victims and we must trust the victims. It takes the “don’t blame the victim” conversation to its logical (absurd) conclusion by thoroughly trashing any requirement for procedural justice. We don’t need to know the facts; only that someone felt hurt. We rely absolutely on a person’s subjective state to adjudicate our shared experience. The most that Sam can discern is that MH has violated what may be described as purity codes. She wears boots that are too fashionable for an activist. She owns property.
Soon, Sam finds herself in the same crosshairs. She works three days a week at the Clara Loomis House, a local museum dedicated to remembering the life and work of a (fictional) suffragette. Unfortunately, Clara Loomis was not perfect and her imperfections set her in violation of present day purity codes and the absolutisms of the activists who enforce them. By association, Sam bears the same taint. If Sam continues to work there, then implicitly she is endorsing the behaviour of a woman who failed to measure up to standards that didn’t exist in her lifetime. This ahistorical view of ethics at work in the world calls to mind Umberto Eco’s essay on Ur Fascism—Eternal Fascism. Eco felt compelled to articulate a list of Fascism’s core features precisely because Fascism can pop up anywhere; it is not context dependent. In its American iteration, it doesn’t matter whether the people holding the view are MAGA rabble or left-wing feminists, they are equally susceptible to Fascism’s lure.
I find Wayward strangely reassuring. For the past four and half years, I have stood on the sidelines of the American drama, my primary view of things mediated by sensational images of a caustic demagogue whipping up his mobs. I labour under accumulated impressions of ignorance and hatred and racism and a general disregard for America’s place in relation to the rest of the world. Wayward feels like a vaccine against the virus of toxic leadership. It reminds me that my impressions have been skewed by media. Most Americans did not vote for Trump, not in 2016 and not in 2020. It reassures me that there are many smart gifted people like Dana Spiotta who are working to interpret the trauma of the last presidency, the wayward drift of an entire nation, and their work offers the promise of healing. Critical voices have not been silenced after all, and the call for an accounting will one day be answered.