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The Floating World

par C. Morgan Babst

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"When a fragile young woman refuses to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approaches, her parents are forced to go without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and their daughter catatonic, the victim or perpetrator of some unknown violent act"--
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This novel which takes place during and after Hurricane Katrina (which hit in August 2005) is almost unremittingly depressing. It centers on the Boisdoré family. Joe, the father, is a Creole descended from freed slaves. Tess, the mother, is from the white upper class, and is pretty much a despicable person. She “settled” for Joe when her high school crush, the white aristocratic Augie, married her best friend Madge. Madge died five years before however from cancer.

The two grown, mixed-race daughters of Joe and Tess, Del (short for Adelaide) and Cora, are in various stages of crisis. Cora, who stayed in the city during the hurricane, is now almost catatonic, presumably suffering from PTSD, although she had a history of depression even before the storm. Del, who was in New York, is suffused with guilt for not having been there in New Orleans to help Cora. Cora and Del also each have romantic interests who, however, remain mostly ciphers, presumably included to illuminate aspects of the girls’ personalities.

Another main character is Joe’s father Vincent. He has Lewy body dementia (LBD,) a progressive brain disorder in which Lewy bodies (abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein) build up in areas of the brain that regulate behavior, cognition, and movement. (As the Mayo Clinic website explains, this is the second most common type of progressive dementia after Alzheimer's disease dementia.) A great deal of the narrative is devoted to Vincent’s dissociation as his mind drifts between the past and present.

As the story begins, Del rushes back to Louisiana to try to help her family. Gradually, we find out (to an extent) what happened to Cora during the storm that caused her trauma, and how Del, always protective of Cora, acts to protect and heal her.

Finally, Katrina is also a main “character” in this book. For those who think a city’s problems are over when the storm passes, this story will serve as a useful (and horrifying) corrective.

This passage, for example, describes what Del sees as she drives through the city over a month after Katrina's landfall:

“There was nobody out on the street, nobody sitting on their porches. Electrical poles titled over the sidewalks, trailing their wires like trees brought down by vines, and everywhere a broken gray crust of dirt covered the concrete, the grass, the trashcans and bicycles, sofas and potted plants strewn on front lawns. On every block, disabled cars had been stranded along the curb, a thick swamp of mud on their upholstery, so that when the occasional undamaged sedan appeared in a driveway beside a flungopen house, it gleamed so brightly you saw stars.”

The outsides of houses, surrounded by “mud-coffined grass” were marked by authorities to indicate if any dead bodies were within. And the insides of the houses were “all flooded so bad the furniture lay overturned in heaps on the floor, every wall stippled with black mold.”

The world's attention turns elsewhere after a hurricane departs. For those directly affected, however, the damage to infrastructure, housing, jobs, water and food supplies, access to medical care, and effects of long-lasting psychological trauma continue to be a challenge. This book highlights what the victims face both during and after the storm.

Discussion: I didn’t find any of the characters very appealing, except for Joe. Tess resented him for not defying police to go back and get Cora after the storm, but Tess is clueless about what it means to be a person of color in relation to the police. Nevertheless, she uses her anger as an excuse to turn to Augie.

My main criticism, however, is that to me, much of the writing meets the definition of what author Ayelet Waldman once called “bore-geous.” This is writing, as she describes it, with “lush and richly imagined bits of narrative - long, lovely descriptions of characters and scenery . . . in which nothing whatsoever was going on.” In short, the writing may be good, but the content is desultory and often just boring.

Evaluation: The tensions of race and class come to the forefront during and after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in this story of a mixed-race family affected by the storm. This bleak story ultimately fell short for me, however. I thought the characters were unappealing, and not really fleshed out enough. Moreover, the writing was too consciously literary rather than focused on the action, so that in the end, I didn’t really even feel I knew all that had happened in the plot. ( )
  nbmars | Dec 18, 2017 |
Set in the days and months following Hurricane Katrina, The Floating World tells the story of the disintegration of the Boisdoré family—mother, psychiatrist Dr. Tess Eschleman; father, artist Joe Boisdoré; sisters Del and Cora; and grandfather, former master woodworker Vincent Boisdoré. Before the storm, Tess and Joe try to get their daughter Cora to go with them—she refuses and her parents evacuate without her. Del rides out the storm in New York, where she fled many years before. After the storm, Tess and Joe return, first to find Cora physically, then to bring her back from where she’s been locked up mentally. Del returns as well, attempting both to draw Cora back to herself to quell pull of New Orleans in her own bones.

Full review posted: http://lisaannreads.wpengine.com/review-the-floating-world/ ( )
  ImLisaAnn | Nov 10, 2017 |
The Floating World by C. Morgan Babst examines the aftermath of Katrina through the life of a family shattered by the event. While reading it, I thought of Kai T. Erikson’s famed “Everything In Its Path” about the Buffalo Creek Flood that destroyed a small community in West Virginia and his research identifying the collective trauma as post-traumatic stress disorder. In a large part, this book is about that collective trauma and its effect on the Boisdoré family.

There are five members of the family we follow. The oldest is the grandfather Vincent who is suffering from dementia. He had been living in a nursing home until evacuated by his son ahead of the flood. He is often living in his childhood. He was a famed cabinet maker from a long line of skilled artisans. Then there is Joe Boisdoré, the father, and his now estranged wife Dr. Tess Eshleman. He is an artist and she is a psychiatrist. They have two daughters, Dolores (Del) and Cora. Cora is deeply depressed. She refused to leave New Orleans during the evacuation and it was three weeks before her family found her. Her family does not know what happened during those three weeks, but they blame each other for allowing it to happen, which is why Tess and Joe have separated. Del had moved to New York and watched the flood on television, but she is no less touched by the trauma of losing home and a solid foundation.

I felt sympathy for each person on their own, but not together. The mother, Tess, is white and so oblivious to privilege. She thinks Joe is a coward because he was turned away by the Blackwater security forces keeping people out. She has no understanding of how privileged her assessment is. His own grandfather was lynched as the adult Vincent surely saw through the lie of his drowning when he grew older and understood the significance of that kerchief around his neck. A guard mock shoots him with a finger-gun, making the point that he could easily kill him with impunity. Joe understands that, but Tess cannot and cannot forgive. Instead, she sees this tragedy as a way to regain the life she wanted when she was in high school, an infantilist regression to an easier life. She even imagines if she had married a white man, she would have easier children. There is so much that appalls me about Tess, even when I feel empathy for her fears about her daughter Cora.

Cora is going through her own hell, deeply traumatized and confused. Del is trying to be supportive and help her but cannot help feeling impatient and sick of it, too. She has her own life to figure out.

The is a lush beauty to the writing in The Floating World which makes me wish I liked it better. I was often struck by beautiful imagery and rich descriptions, but the story itself felt jumbled and chaotic. Perhaps this was a deliberate choice, mental illness is often chaotic and jumbled and navigating through it can make one feel lost and confused. The story jumps from one person to the next, a fairly common narrative technique. However, the transitions are disjointed and disruptive. They seem designed to unsettle the reader more than further the story. These breaks give the story a hallucinatory feeling at times that may be a deliberate effort to evoke the confusion and alienation of trauma, but for me, was simply annoying. Babst is clearly an excellent stylist, I just wish she did not work so hard to confound her readers.

I received an e-galley of The Floating World from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Floating World at Algonquin
C. Morgan Babst author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/9781616205287/ ( )
  Tonstant.Weader | Oct 28, 2017 |
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"When a fragile young woman refuses to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approaches, her parents are forced to go without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and their daughter catatonic, the victim or perpetrator of some unknown violent act"--

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