Random House
Review by Walter Cummins

The pleasure of reading The Morningside is engaging with the inventive creations of Téa Obreht’s impressive imagination. The frustration is not getting a developed fulfillment of so many engaging plot threads. Instead of exploring the inherent richness of the initial unknown, Obreht comes up with additional compelling issues and then ends up trying to knit them all together. Instead of a novel that culminates with a strong singular impact, finishing this one relies more of the reader’s curiosity of how she is going to integrate the various stories. That she does in a technical sense instead of realizing the strong potential latent in any one.
The title Morningside comes from the remnant of what had been a luxury century-old apartment building now run down and sparsely populated on a climate ravaged island in a city reminiscent of New York. Many of the flooded, crumbling buildings are uninhabited. A Repopulation Program brings the eleven-year-old narrator, Silvia—Sil—and her mother to shelter in the apartment of the mother’s aunt, Ena, who does the building’s maintenance. Unable to find a place in the crowded schools, Sil’s empty days give her plenty of time to explore and conjure mysteries about the thirty-plus stories. When her aunt dies, Sil helps her mother take over caretaking, which provides her an additional excuse to roam in the empty apartments and share Eda’s beliefs in occult possibilities.
Her main mystery is that of Bezi Duras, who occupies the thirty-third floor penthouse reachable by a private elevator. Bezi is considered to be a painter, but Sil wonders about the three large and strange dogs, Reza walks for long hours every evening. Sil, wondering if they are truly dogs, is determined to get inside the penthouse. She comes to believe the dogs are transformed men and thar Bezi is actually a creature called a Vila, a spirit of the mountain in these peoples’ old country, referred to as Back Home, an enchantress from the “real world,” not the illusory one Sil believes those around her inhabit.
Is she? If so, what powers does she possess? The Bezi Duras unknowns offer enough possibilities to engender a complete novel. Her mystery grows in disturbing complexity when Sil and Mila, another young girl who has moved into the Morningside, follow three boys through the fog-dark, ruined streets of the city. Led by Mila, Sil is “leaden with fear and disbelief.” They enter a room in a decrepit building, where “where an old, almost bald woman in a dark coat was dropping the crane eggs into a pot on the stove.” Sil is shocked by the realization that this woman is an avatar of Bezi Duras and the three boys her dogs, this place where she goes at night when she leaves the Morningside.
Obreht’s writing of the girls’ quest and their discovery captures the decayed location, Sil’s terrified reaction, and the suggestion of Bezi Duras’ strange powers. At this point, an intensity of unknowns drive the novel. Unfortunately, that Bezi Duras drops out, to be replaced by another version—a rich woman living in a room full of paintings who hosts an elegant party to raise contributions for the Repopulation Program, only to attack the Program as a financial scam. What happened to the Vila?
The novel shifts plots several times after that with Sil’s mother working in a reclamation crew of a building that collapses and apparently drowns her. She is saved. Then she returns to the Morningside to discover that Mila’s father is actually a mass murder from Back Home living under a pseudonym. The focus then changes to the expatriate story of Sil and her mother in the context of the wars that shook their original homeland. With Mila’s father aware of their attempts to expose him, they must flee. This is, in effect, a new story with another central character, the writer Lewis May, brought back for a final involvement. Bezi Duras retreats to a fringe, her fictional potential never realized, her death mentioned on the final pages, some unknown person walking off with the dogs. Perhaps it was Mila, who had disappeared in an assumed kidnapping. But why should the novel culminate with a hint of Mila?
Near the end Sil’s mother tells her, “The past is immense. But it means less and less. So we go on without. And that’s fine, Sil. It’s fine.” It’s not fine for a novel that raises so many questions about the past and does not suggest meaningful answers.
In the pages of The Morningside, Obreht offers the material for several novels of strong potential but never explores any one to its full potential. She has done that in her first two novels and is likely to repeat those successes in novels to come.