Fiction by Nora Lange, reviewed by Maya Grunschlag
US FOOLS (Two Dollar Radio)
A pink cover decorated with a photograph of lounging blondes may delude some readers into expecting a candy-floss tale of girlhood. Us Fools is a far denser treat. Nora Lange’s debut novel—an American story of sisterhood amidst poverty—seethes with intelligence, style, and complexity.
Based on the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s and its devastating consequences, Us Fools follows the Fareown family, one of many who are forced to sell their farms due to the mounting debt and falling crop prices that drove the collapse of agricultural banks. The fragmented narrative begins with both sisters in their early 30s; Bernie, the younger of the two, finds herself alone in a motel room in Minnesota, while her older sister, Joanne, has headed out to sea on an Alaskan fishing boat. After years spent in the shadow of her sister’s chaotic path, Bernie is frozen on her own. She will spend six months inside that motel room, unsure where to go next. As Bernie traverses the annals of her memory in an effort to understand how her life became what it is, the reader is offered vignettes into her childhood and adolescence. Ricocheting between past and present, fact and fiction, Lange offers a portrait of two sisters whose lives are enmeshed with each other—and with American history.
Bernie and Joanne’s childhood is dominated by the torrent of an unrelenting economic crisis. Jo Fareown—headstrong, incorrigible, and prone to hiding out in the garrett—is reminiscent of Jo March, from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Lange, however, writes not of a quaint New England town but of a Midwest forgotten “like a bruise left to fade,” where the cows are so starved they are impaling themselves on barbed wire and the men are “sitting on buckets sobbing in the open.” Lange’s Jo is so frustrated with America and “its orgies of barbarism” that at 11 years old she jumps off the farmhouse roof, breaking both of her legs. This act is not pure adolescent volatility but a symptom of a far-reaching sense of desperation, as Lange demonstrates by weaving documented news coverage into her fictional narrative:
The National Farm Medicine Center, founded in 1981 to conduct agricultural health and safety research and education, reported in the Upper Midwest more than 900 male farmers, 71 female farmers, 96 farm children, and 177 farm workers killed themselves from 1980 to 1988 (the last year that figures were compiled). In Sioux City, Iowa, a farmer’s suicide note said: “The farm killed me.”
The girls feel trapped. They fantasize about catapulting themselves out of the Midwest with a giant rubber band. The farmhouse is a crucible, inside which their mother Sylvia homeschools them via Ovidian myths that she intends to serve “as a template for living in our house, on our land, in America.” When the crop value plummets and debt amasses, the templates no longer fit. For Bernie, the disruption of childhood fantasy is early and brutal. It begins the day she learns that the unicorns at her beloved local circus are no more than goats with surgically implanted horns. Soon she has forgotten the unicorns and begun to dream instead of vitamins and a Thanksgiving table full of food.
Throughout the novel, Lange expertly evokes the oppressive atmosphere of rural poverty: the Fareowns are surrounded by roads, rivers, and highways, but they have no way out from their debt. Without an expensive scoliosis brace, the unyielding curve of Jo’s spine threatens to crush her lungs. Henry, the girls’ father, cycles between alcoholism, mania, and depression; he has punched the living room table so many times that it’s started to resemble an egg crate. Sylvia, burdened with sole responsibility for her family’s domestic life, tries to keep them afloat, doing “the undervalued and overlooked mandatory ‘helping’ work (‘I’m helping’ she would say sarcastically)—canning, accounting, cooking, cleaning, bathing, feeding, consoling, laundering, shopping, house maintenance, and clothing all members of our family.” Eventually, the Fareowns sell their farm for next to nothing and move to Chicago to look for work.
The conclusion that farming for our family was no longer a viable way to live rattled our parents to their core. Whatever had been attached before, like an arm in a socket, was now separating. It was nasty, agonizing, as though their skin was removing itself from their bones.
This spiritual decomposition leaves the sisters without any dependable role models. In response, Bernie relies on instinct to adjust to life in the city, and unsurprisingly, her instinct is to conform with American society. On the other hand, Jo seeks only to disrupt it. These opposing impulses—nascent since girlhood—dictate the course of their adult lives. Joanne wanders around Chicago spouting off about capitalism and the state of America. She is expelled from high school for delivering one such monologue over the loudspeaker while slicing up her hands. People outside the Fareown family—like mental health professionals—treat Joanne as a deranged victim of her own madness. As Sylvia says, “Responding in America to America can have terrible repercussions for women.” For Jo, these include being locked up in padded rooms. Yet Bernie never stops seeing her older sister as a kind of deity, which encourages the reader to view Jo as more truth-teller than madwoman. Perhaps Lange wants to emphasize that the line between the two is not so distinct.
In an interview about Us Fools, she described how she “went mad in writing this book,” which was a process of “seeking anarchy.” A certain amount of this madness can be discerned in the fragmented structure and looping chronology of the text itself. Lange’s metaphors pulse with the same anarchic impulse. In the acknowledgements, she thanks Renee Gladman, who’s recently published My Lesbian Novel strives for a similar upending of form; it is tempting to compare the two writers in their rebellions against novelistic convention. One could even compare Lange to her protagonist Joanne. For both, attempting to confront the situation of women in America incited a certain degree of insanity.
At times while reading this, it is hard not to feel engulfed by a savage pessimism. Yet, the novel moves forward. The sisters too. Bernie, magnetized by Joanne, “love-loathing” her, searches for freedom from the burden of her sister’s disfigured perspective. Joanne’s voice, her “disdain for America,” never leaves Bernie’s mind, until the final moment of the novel, when Bernie finally declares “America could be beautiful.” Both sisters’ lives remain in flux, the America question unresolved, but there is some reprieve that Lange can grant her readers: hope.
Maya Grunschlag is a student in the Huntsman Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She enjoys reading novels and spending time with her friends and family.
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