At Home in the Water
A climate refugee yearns to understand where she comes from in Téa Obreht’s new novel.
THE ELEGANT, EFFORTLESS world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, “The Morningside,” begins with a map. Island City resembles Manhattan, but alarmingly smaller, the borders of the city redrawn by the rising water. There’s the River to the east, the Bay to the west. Here, hurricanes and tides have made building collapse a constant danger, the freeway is visible only on low-tide days, food is government rations, the wealthy have fled “upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” and gigantic birds called rook cranes are everywhere.
Obreht’s third novel (after her critically acclaimed best sellers “The Tiger’s Wife” and “Inland”) builds upon her short story from The New York Times Magazine’s Decameron Project, in which 29 writers were commissioned to write stories inspired by the cataclysmic mood of 2020. It takes us decades into an eerie imagined future, when a curious, lonely, magic-inclined 11-year-old climate refugee named Silvia (Sil) and her mother have journeyed 5,000 miles to Island City. They’re part of the federal Repopulation Program, which recruits people from abroad to “sway the balance against total urban abandonment.”
Because of war and the “displacement of earth” that eventually erased their homeland (known only as “Back Home”) from the map, they fled when Sil was only a year old. After many desperate moves, they’ve reunited with their only living relative, Sil’s aunt Ena, the superintendent of a formerly grand, now mostly empty 33-story apartment tower called the Morningside, once “the jewel of an uppercity neighborhood called Battle Hill.”
The book’s central mystery is the rumored role of Sil’s mother in a major criminal case (cryptically referred to as “the Belen case”), but it’s a testament to Obreht’s skill that the details of this world fascinate as much as the characters, together forming a picture of dystopian urban planning. Setting the story in a country that resembles America, Obreht envisions a more generous and ideologically aligned government — and a more robust democracy — than we have now. The Repopulation Program is “a way for the administration to cover the climate debts it owed around the world without raising taxes”; Sil and her mom are waiting for a new townhouse promised to them (and to all Repopulation families) for their role in the city’s revitalization.
The only child in the Morningside, Sil yearns to understand her mother, culture and homeland. But her loving, secretive mother, burdened by “the jealous, vengeful forces that had shadowed her all her life,” is committed to hiding their origins, won’t tell Sil anything about her father, and makes them live by strict, isolating rules. They don’t keep pictures or records. They can’t reveal compromising information. Most important, Sil can speak “Ours,” their native tongue, “only at home, only with family.”
Aunt Ena, however, wants to reminisce, offering Sil not just scrapbooks and stories, but the beginnings of a spiritual and cultural inheritance through folk tales. According to Ena, there’s a “world underneath the world.” As for the building’s most mysterious resident, Bezi Duras, a renowned, elderly painter who lives in the penthouse and emerges only in the evenings to walk her three enormous black dogs, Ena tells Sil that Bezi’s dogs are enchanted: They’re men during the day and dogs at night. She shares a folk tale about a mountain spirit called a Vila, whose three sons roam in animal form.
Sil wants to confirm that Bezi is such an enchantress, but this knowledge can’t be acquired directly. Per Ena’s instructions, shee must drift into insight. She must be ready. So Sil searches for “little clues to the enchanted truth,” while trying again and again to gain entry to Bezi’s penthouse. With proof, she’ll be able to share this “strange and powerful” secret with her skeptical mother.
Most of the action in the first half takes place within the building, as Sil helps Ena, and then her mother, while waiting for a spot at school. I was especially moved by Sil’s reliance on talismans and rituals and how she makes “protections,” creating a feeling of safety in her new home using scissors, an old perfume bottle and a jar of fig jam that connects her to her ancestors.
While surveilling Bezi, Sil meets a middle-aged Black novelist named Lewis May, the building’s former superintendent, who promises her a key to Bezi’s penthouse if she’ll retrieve letters he hid in the building years earlier. Through May’s story line, Obreht seamlessly
weaves in the history of Island City, but I struggled to feel invested in his subplot about fraud and literary theft. However, May comes to play a crucial role late in the book, in a stroke of ingenious plotting.
Sil finally gains a friend her age when Mila and her mother move into the building. Though Sil’s mother is critical of the newcomers, who are also from Back Home, Sil is besotted with the brazen Mila, who leads both Sil and the book toward greater adventure and danger. I want to tell you about Sil and Mila roaming Island City, Sil’s mother’s new career, and how a cosmic bargain relates to the Belen case, but don’t want to spoil the novel’s immensely satisfying twists.
Throughout, I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose: Bezi’s dogs “looked like they were made of soot and steel wool”; figs have an “oldnew sunlight taste.” Calling Sil and her mother’s native language “Ours” and their homeland “Back Home” grants the story a feeling of universality. Though we eventually get allusions to real-life wars and war crimes, Sil could be any young refugee wondering what her parent survived, trying to make sense of buried trauma and forge a deeper connection: “The great, rushing force of what she knew had followed her everywhere we went. It had followed me, too, even though I neither recognized it nor knew its name.”
Read in the context of today’s conflicts and injustices, climate emergencies, and political and racial divisions — together more dystopian than any dystopian novel — the book surprised me most with its undercurrent of hope. It flows from Obreht’s portrait of family and community, the suggestion that stories and magic offer, if not a solution or a means of survival, then a way for a child to connect to her heritage and try to make sense of an impossible reality. By weaving in folklore and ample wonder, Obreht gives her climate fiction ancient roots, forcing us to reckon with the ruined world that future generations will inherit, while reminding us that even in the face of catastrophe, there’s solace to be found in art.