In her debut novel JOURNEYING HOME, author Emily Saxe Nydam has created a touching drama. The action bifurcates between Lizzy (who begins life stuck on a farm in turn-of-the-century Virginia) and Gwen (living in present-day Massachusetts). Lizzy’s background is deprived and terrible—she and a younger sister are preyed upon by her “ruined with whiskey” father—but a love for reading and a chance encounter with an older woman living in the community, who requires help caring for her elderly parents, puts the youngster on a path that will shortly take her into higher education and nursing. This leads to the Western Front of The Great War, where she tends to the wounds of horribly injured soldiers. Gwen’s travails are more workaday: she, a mother of one adult son, has a comfortable life but is in the middle of a divorce. However, she finds herself the guardian of her great aunt Lizzy’s memory. Nydam’s prose is an effortless read, and there is a noticeable flair for naturalistic dialogue appropriate to the era.
The main drawbacks are not stylistic but structural. In this type of narrative, the ability to ensure the characters’ stories are equally compelling is important. As there is so much more going on in Lizzy’s life than in Gwen’s—the latter even acknowledges that she “hadn’t had many adventures”—Nydam attempts to fill the gap by having her track down Lizzy’s voluminous personal papers in an archive. These sections do have their attractions; anyone familiar with the business of doing research in a record office or library will know the thrill of the chase, the excitement of discovery. But while the incremental way in which Lizzy gets her start in life is nicely constructed, there is a hint of contrivance in the mechanisms by which Lizzy’s love triangle and Gwen’s post-divorce romance occur.
Thankfully, this does not militate against the novel’s rhetorical power. Themes of obligation and innocence loom large in both Lizzy’s and Gwen’s stories—the former’s tryst with an injured soldier has a predictable outcome—and what lingers afterward is a sense not of fate, exactly, but of individual wills working to battle the whims of chance. That is all that any of us can do, and it is Nydam’s achievement to recognize that we are what we make of ourselves in spite of that.
Emily Saxe Nydam’s JOURNEYING HOME is an absorbing family drama that successfully explores how the lives of two women separated by 100 years of history intertwine.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader