Random House
Review by Walter Cummins
Téa Obreht’s latest work, Sunrise, while offering seemingly self-contained narratives about events from several different time periods, can also be regarded as a novel about an author’s storytelling challenges. Each of the narratives comes across as an engaging adventure tale animated by its own set of vivid characters and the resulting tensions, but ultimately everything in the work is related to a central question of what it is all about and the attempts to come up with answers both from the people living through the stories and from an author who has to create convincing explanations.
In Sunrise a metawriting author who explains her imaginative dilemma is not Obreht but rather Louise Hartley, a character in one of the stories who composed a long manuscript about what happened in the town of Sunrise and the country around it in 1902. Of course, Louise is an Obreht creation who functions as a surrogate for the real author, and she foreshadows Obreht’s task in resolving the conclusion of the entire novel.
But Louise establishes the authorial issues by explaining the complications she faces at the end of the novel’s third section, “An Incident at the Cabin Bar Outside the Town of Salt Draw: 2003.” There Louise, having after researched a version of what happened in Sunrise in 1902, has a dispute with Coll Land, the local historian who stages a yearly reenactment of the events.
She tells him, “Everything you present here is something you want to be true.” And he responds, “By that logic, everything in your book is something you want to be true.” Coll then considers her his antagonist. Behind their conflict is the mystery of what really happened.
In an email to him she clarifies the authorial conundrum at the heart of their dispute: “I’ve reached the limits of what I feel I can write, ethically and maybe even aesthetically. It’s one thing, in my mind, to take artistic license with somebody’s life, but I want to be careful doing so with somebody’s death. These were, after all, real people. I have grown very close to the versions of them I think I know. However, other people are close to versions they think they know. People like you.”
The specific uncertainty is the question of death, “Who killed Anton Vargas?” The Vargas story is told in the second section of the novel, “An Incident at Burnt Creek on the Occasion of a Homecoming: 1902,” and continued in the fourth, “An Incident in the Warrens on the Occasion of a Reunion: 1902.” Both turn out to come from the unpublished book written by Louise Hartley, all the events leading up to the mystery of how Anton’s life ended.
The situation behind that mystery opens with Anton, with a reputation as a gunfighter, returning to Sunrise after twenty years’ absence, unsettling those who knew him and reestablishing a contact with Fred Kipley, now a law enforcer. Their immediate focus appears to be a missing boy, but Anton’s real goal for returning was finding Preacher, a doctor who had once been a priest and who Kipley wants to keep apart from Anton because of an unexplained tension between the two men.
The fourth section fills in the facts of the 1902 cooperation between Anton and Preacher, including their role in a deadly gunfight outside of town. Although the details of that incident and the relationships leading up to it are fully revealed, what happened between the two men afterward is not.
Louise accessed the information used in her writing from a newly discovered taped interview with Kipley years after the events. Coll, who considers himself a historian, won’t include facts from that interview until it has been authenticated.
How does Louise’s book become a source of Obecht’s novel? That brings in another character and situation that frames the beginning and ending of Sunrise. In the initial chapter, Nina Terzić, in a Cessna piloted by her high school boyfriend, Ben, has crashed near Wyoming’s Horsebone Lake, where she finds herself in water far from shore; but she manages to swim to land, expecting Ben, an abusive man with whom she would like to break up, to be nearby. He’s not. Her optimism reveals that she is innocent and naïve, with no idea of how to cope with being lost in a wilderness far from any town and with nothing to eat but protein bars. Her cell phone still has a charge but no signal. Her immediate thoughts are dominated by the problem of missing the evening’s dinner reservations at a fancy restaurant.
Nina walks with no real goal until she finally sees shapes that turn out to be the remains of Sunrise, now a decaying ghost town. There, exploring the empty buildings, she discovers a trap door and below, among other significant objects, a satchel belonging to an LT Hawley, whom she does not know is named Louise. Inside, she finds a photocopy of the many pages of a Times New Roman manuscript titled An Incident at Greyrock. That work turns out to be the text of parts two and four of Sunrise.
It’s also the source of Nina’s knowledge of the 1902 Anton Vargas story and the formation of a personal and physical connection with LT Hawley.
In the final section of Sunrise, a much wiser Nina has a plan the reach an inhabited town twenty-five miles north, but she blunders and has doubts about survival, imagining the details of her own likely ending, writing in her head the stages of her dying. The final pages temporarily unite her with other characters but leave her alone in a truck rushing to wherever she’s going. Like the unknown of Anton Vargas’s death, Nina’s future remains open.
In creating Sunrise Téa Obreht has produced a uniquely inventive and complex novel that makes the past inseparable from the present and the living from the dead. Behind the whole is the authorial task of shaping what is known and addressing the unknown.
