True north
Seeking to mend their grief, members of utopian community find themselves in neither heaven nor hell
For Rio, one of the two protagonists of Gabriel Bump’s “The New Naturals,” the world has become too much — “imploding in certain places, exploding in others, melting, sliding, boiling.” She can hardly be blamed. It’s become increasingly more difficult to disconnect; the news has become a nonstop onslaught of death, disaster, tragedy, and it demands the unceasing attention of anyone who encounters it. For many, a nervous breakdown is just one push notification, one social media post away.
Rio reaches her wits’ end while working in Boston, where she lives with her husband, Gibraltar; the two are academics “at a liberal arts college with a progressive mission. They taught Black people to white children.” Rio is a historian, while Gibraltar studies athletics, and dreams of writing a book and, ideally, getting “paid lump sums to comment on race for media conglomerates.”
Rio is pregnant with their first child, and after collapsing in their home, realizes that she “wanted to leave it all, all of it, every meeting, each paper, each class, each forced exchange with a colleague, a student, a stranger on the sidewalk forcing her aside.” She and Gibraltar pull up stakes and move to western Massachusetts, where they pass their time in the windowless basement of their home, monitoring the decline of modern society. Rio hangs a world map on a wall, marking with an X every act of violence, disaster, disease.
Things only get worse when their daughter dies shortly after her birth:
“How does a couple survive such a loss? Celestial beauty is gifted to you in this brilliant small package, with eyes like mother and cheeks like father … Then — how do you prepare for the doctor to pull you
aside and explain how vulnerable your daughter was to air and sickness? How does wife tell husband that she wants to die, too? How does husband tell wife that life is still meaningful?”
Wracked with grief, but unwilling to give in, Rio finds a purpose after seeing an abandoned mountaintop restaurant while on a run. She decides to turn it, and the land below it, into an intentional community for lost souls, called the New Naturals: “She and Gibraltar would bring them here. They would burrow inside, create a dream, let them in, anybody, everybody — they would make a place for everyone.”
Gibraltar agrees, despite his initial misgivings, and Rio finds someone to bankroll the project: “The Benefactor had been a college-aged genius. A visionary. The mind behind Polonaise, high-speed servers capable of handling galaxies full of data … She was a growing conglomerate. A scourge of Congress. An antitrust behemoth.” Word gets out about the community, and it attracts a variety of people struggling with disillusionment, all “lost and confused in unique ways.”
Rio and Gibraltar’s story is interspersed with those of some of the would-be pilgrims, including Sojourner, a disenchanted journalist who “had gotten used to not mattering”; Bounce, a former soccer player struggling with serious depression; and Elting and Buchanan, two homeless men from Chicago.
The latter two — a kind of modern-day Vladimir and Estragon from “Waiting for Godot” — are particularly compelling with their plaintive, sometimes existential dialogue. “What if they’re wrong?” worries Buchanan. “What if this is another Jonestown? They make documentaries about this stuff. Utopias and false hope. What if there is nothing better out there? What if this world is all we have?”
It’s not another Jamestown, but neither is it a success. “The New Naturals” ends where it has to; Bump avoids both Panglossian sunniness and cynical, world-weary posturing in the novel, and it works in his favor.
It helps that Bump treats his characters with respect. Grief is an undercurrent throughout the book, not just for Rio and Gibraltar, who have lost their daughter, but for Sojourner, who has lost her sense of self, and Bounce, who has lost his will to live. The reader senses early on that Rio and Gibraltar’s project is implausible, fueled by grief and naivety, but Bump lets his characters experience their wild hopes; he knows that the wounded will look for healing wherever they can find it, even in an overly ambitious community beneath an abandoned restaurant.
Bump also, crucially, doesn’t give too much away. The novel focuses more on the community’s founders, and the people who aspire to go there, than the ambitious society itself. The reader sees the community mostly through the eyes of the nameless benefactor, who provides the first sign that things might not work out as Rio and Gibraltar intended: “Fewer people were coming. People were getting sick … People were starting to complain about the limited classes. They wanted collegelevel courses. They didn’t have enough faculty yet. They didn’t have an expert on Irish Modernism. And the movie selection, the wine. People were starting to feel stir-crazy.”
Bump lets the reader fill in the gaps, which proves to be a smart decision — his focus is on the gaps left in people’s lives more than the quixotic ways they try to fill them, and that’s what makes the novel so strong. “The New Naturals” is a fascinating book, frequently funny, even more frequently heartbreaking, and tuned in to the reality that change is the only constant in a profoundly broken world. “When we get there,” Buchanan asks Elting at one point, “what happens if it’s the same?”
“Nothing is ever the same,” Elting replies. For better, and mostly for worse, he’s right.