"Elsewhere" by Alxis Schaitkin

A new work of fiction out this year takes up the themes of belonging, of motherhood, of temporal and spatial perception, and of the human need to make sense of life. Its tight focus helps it succeed in teaching us about ourselves, but its occasional asides jumble its lessons, or rather, fall short of clarity of what it would instruct.

Vera, the first-person narrator of Alexis Schaitkin’s novel Elsewhere, spends the entire novel elsewhere. We meet her during the last year of her schooling in an unnamed and  remote mountain town where clouds form the everyday atmosphere, and in which the citizens are unusually close-knit. This location strongly evokes a fairy tale: it is a closed, completely insular community in which every citizen has a sort of celebrity, their personal business out in the open for all to see and inspect.

The salient feature of the town results in this closeness, and makes the town unique. Young mothers suffer an “affliction,” in which they disappear, evaporating figuratively into thin air. No one sees them go, and in the aftermath of each “leaving,” the mother’s friends and neighbors compulsively recapitulate how they might have known who would leave, of what the prior indicators were.

I’m spending time on the setting of this novel because of its paramount importance. Through it, the author considers such timeless human themes of parental love, tribal groupthink, shifts in perspective arising from growing older, and setting’s influence on moral character. Vera considers some refined points of her existence: her interactions with her family and what they indicate about her fears of “going;” what does her love mean, and how much of it is actually self-reflective; can she buck the universal expectation of “going,” and thereby disrupt the town’s Otherness?

Frequently fiction answers such questions, but Schaitkin leaves the answers much less certain than usual. Nothing wrong with that, but it felt to me like more certainty would have made the novel better. Her language is perfectly suited to its subject; her pacing variable but very appropriate to the protagonist’s progress. Motherhood is the kernel at the core of this book, and the author holds it up for close inspection: its trials, its effect on the mother and the child, and how absence and the passage of time alter it.

If these themes move you, by all means take up Elsewhere. I found its unusual setting and plot unique and refreshing, but its personal issues of growth and change lacking somewhat in depth.