Sep 25

Sep 25 Zorrie

Author: Laird Hunt
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From prize-winning, acclaimed author Laird Hunt, a poignant novel about a woman searching for her place in the world and finding it in the daily rhythms of life in rural Indiana.

“It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.”

As a girl, Zorrie Underwood’s modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.

But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.

Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt’s extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.

TL;DR Review

Zorrie is a quiet but emotional novel. It’s short, and yet contains a woman’s whole life — with deep characterization. I read it in one day and enjoyed it very much.

For you if: You like character-driven historical fiction.

Full Review

“Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the ‘fragile film of the present’ felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried.”

Zorrie landed on my radar because it was longlisted for the National Book Award. This was my first Laird Hunt novel, and I really liked it! The prose is truly beautiful, and it made me feel so many emotions.

The book is less than 200 pages long, but it covers Zorrie’s entire life — from looking for work as a young woman during the Depression, to her short stint in a radium plant, to her years as a farmer. It covers much of the 20th century in America. And yet I don’t feel like it was rushed — the blurbs compare this one to Elizabeth Strout, and I think this economy of language and impressively efficient characterization are exactly why. It’s also been compared to Marilynne Robinson, which I can also understand. It’s the same kind of soft but powerful language — and of course, it’s historical fiction set in the midwest.

I read this book in one day, and I think it could be enjoyed that way or savored. It’s melancholy, but somehow also like warm sunshine on amber fields of grain. It’s about family and loneliness and purpose and grief and America. It probably won’t be for everyone, but if you like quiet, character-driven historical fiction, pick this one up.