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Summary
Summary
"Set in New Orleans, this important and powerful novel follows the Boisdoré family . . . in the months after Katrina. A profound, moving and authentically detailed picture of the storm's emotional impact on those who lived through it." -- People
In this dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, C. Morgan Babst takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina and the life of a great city.
As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdoré refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city's preeminent furniture makers, and his white "Uptown" wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic--the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself.
This mystery is at the center of Babst's haunting and profound novel. Cora's sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the successful life she built in New York City to find her hometown in ruins and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to figure out what happened to her sister, she must also reckon with the racial history of the city and the trauma of a disaster that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy visited on New Orleans's most vulnerable citizens. Separately and together, each member of the Boisdoré clan must find the strength to remake home in a city forever changed.
The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told--one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a vivid, intimate understanding of this particular place and its tangled past.
Author Notes
C. Morgan Babst studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and NYU. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as the Oxford American , Guernica , the Harvard Review , LitHub , and the New Orleans Review , and her piece "Death Is a Way to Be" was honored as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016 . She evacuated New Orleans one day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. After eleven years in New York, she now lives in New Orleans with her husband and child.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Babst's tightly written debut focuses on the fractured Boisdoré clan, whose familial tensions are brought to a head in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Six weeks after the storm, Joe, an absent-minded furniture maker separated from his wife, Tess, a psychologist and the breadwinner, moves in with his father, Vincent, who has dementia. Tess and Joe split because she is furious with him for failing to rescue their daughter, stubborn 28-year-old Cora, from New Orleans after she refused to evacuate. Their other child, Del, returns home after having suddenly lost her job in New York to find Cora in a near-catatonic state. Cora, who has a history of mental illness, went through an experience during the storm that left her traumatized. After Del discovers a body in a house where Cora weathered part of Katrina, Del and Cora become increasingly convinced that Cora may be responsible. As the sisters try to figure out who committed the crime, Babst skillfully makes the reader feel Del's desperate fears about Cora and the sisters' frustrations with their elders. She's also adept at pitting Tess's pushy nature against Joe's more passive tendencies. Despite a discordant ending, this is a riveting novel about the inescapable pull of family. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A New Orleans family is shattered and scattered by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath."Grief was infinite, though, wasn't it," thinks one of the characters midway through this powerful, important novel, "something like love that, divided, did not diminish." Babst's debut tracks the experiences of five family members from the pre-Katrina evacuation of the city through late November 2005, 93 days after landfall. Dr. Tess Eshleman is a psychiatrist, an Uptown blue blood married to Joe Boisdor, a Creole sculptor descended from freed slaves whose work has made it as far as the Guggenheim; the couple raised their two mixed-race daughters in a historic house on the Esplanade. By the time the hurricane drops a magnolia tree through the roof of that home, Tess and Joe have evacuated to Houston, taking with them Joe's father, who suffers from advanced Lewy body dementia and was in an institution until it shut down for the storm. Their daughter Cora, who struggles with mental illness and depression, refused to leave with the family, then cannot be found when they return. By the time their other daughter, Del, arrives from New York City in October, the pressures of the storm have driven Tess and Joe to separateand though Cora has been found, drinking tea with an elderly friend of the family in the ruins of her garden, she is catatonic. Much of the plot is devoted to unpacking exactly what happened to her during the storm and the flood. This novel is New Orleans to the bone, an authentic, detailed picture of the physical and emotional geography of the city, before, during, and after the tragedy, its social strata, its racial complications, the zillion cultural details that define its character: the parrots in the palm trees, the pork in the green beans, the vein in the shrimp, "the goddamned tacky way he flew his Rex flag out of season." Deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In New Orleans, one month after Hurricane Katrina, the extended Boisdoré clan is painfully adrift. Joe and Tess can hardly welcome their daughter Del when she returns from New York, so preoccupied are they with their older daughter Cora, who is physically present but unreachable; Joe's dad, whose dementia is rapidly progressing; and their own, crumbling marriage. When Joe and Tess obeyed the prestorm mandatory-evacuation order, Cora stayed behind. She had lived through storms; how bad could it be? Unfathomable, in fact. In the aftermath, while her family worried that they'd lost her, Cora helped rescue others, her friend's two young nephews in particular. But now Cora is mysteriously stricken with a sense of responsibility for the boys' mother's death. Babst closely follows each Boisdoré, reconstructing the histories of their racially blended family, their decimated city, and what went on while Cora was the only member of the family there. Waving through time in chapters labeled with the number of days before or after Katrina's landfall, Babst's debut will appropriately unmoor readers, too.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ENEMIES AND NEIGHBORS: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, by Ian Black. (Atlantic Monthly, $30.) Black, a veteran correspondent for The Guardian, argues in this sweeping history that Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were irreconcilable from the start, and that peace is as remote as ever. THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE: Stories, by Daniel Alarcon. (Riverhead Books, $27.) The stories in this slim, affecting work of fiction feature young men in various states of displacement after dictatorship yields to fragile democracy in an unnamed country. Alarcon, who also happens to be a gifted journalist, couples narrative experimentation with imaginative empathy. TEXAS BLOOD: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands, by Roger D. Hodge. (Knopf, $28.95.) Hodge's fervent pastiche of memory and reportage and history tells the story of South Texas as it intersects with generations of his ancestors. SOLAR BONES, by Mike McCormack. (Soho Press, $25.) A civil engineer sits in his kitchen feeling inexplicably disoriented, as if untethered from the world. In fact, he is dead, a ghost, even if he does not realize it. This wonderfully original book owes a debt to modernism but is up to something all its own. ISTANBUL: A Tale of Three Cities, by Bettany Hughes. (Da Capo, $40.) A British scholar known for her popular television documentaries shows readers how a prehistoric settlement evolved through the centuries into a great metropolis, the crossroads where East meets West. THE WRITTEN WORLD: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization, by Martin Puchner. (Random House, $32.) Puchner, an English professor at Harvard, makes the case for literature's pervasive importance as a force that has shaped the societies we have built and our very sensibilities as human beings. THE FLOATING WORLD, by C. Morgan Babst. (Algonquin, $26.95.) An inescapable, almost oppressive sense of loss permeates each page of this powerful debut novel about a mixed-race New Orleans family in the days after Hurricane Katrina. As an elegy for a ruined city, it is infused with soulful details. ROBICHEAUX, by James Lee Burke. (Simon & Schuster, $27.99.) The Iberia Parish sheriff's detective tangles with mob bosses and crooked politicians in this latest installment in a crime series steeped in the history and lore of the Louisiana bayous. THREE FLOORS UP, by Eshkol Nevo. (Other Press, paper, $16.95.) Three linked novellas about life in an Israeli apartment building capture the lies we tell ourselves and others in order to construct identity. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
DEBUT A richly written, soak-in-it kind of book, Babst's debut takes us to New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, revealing the consequences for one beleaguered family. Descended from a freed slave and son of a cabinetmaker whom he's caring for assiduously, artist Joe Boisdoré is married to Dr. Tess Eshleman, a white woman from New Orleans high society, and their fraying marriage is totally upended when older daughter Cora refuses to evacuate as Katrina approaches. Cora survives but fears she has done something terrible, and the mystery of what really happened unfolds with breath-holding poignancy throughout the shifting narrative. Meanwhile, Tess links up with past friends while accusing Joe of cowardice for failing to rescue Cora, and younger daughter Del, home from New York, remains crusty with her parents but acts boldly to help her sister. In the end, the hurricane doesn't so much change these people as send them down paths they were already starting to walk, if not always happily, so that finally they live up to the book's last sentence, "I'm home." VERDICT Now you'll know what it was like to have survived Katrina. Occasionally overly detailed but utterly affecting. [See Prepub Alert, 5/22/17.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
