The surprise electoral win of Donald Trump in 2016 and its effect on the mental health of liberals has been explored in amusingly anguished novels like Bill McKibben's Radio Free Vermont and Ali Benjamin's The Smash-Up, and now in Dana Spiotta's Wayward. Spiotta (Stone Arabia) offers a spoofy but wrenching tale about a personal crisis befalling a woman who is resisting Trumpism from central New York.
Set in 2017, Wayward centers on 53-year-old Samantha Raymond, who has always been impetuous, but the one-two punch of Trump's election and perimenopause have made her only more so: as the novel opens, she has decided to leave her lawyer husband and suburban home for a dilapidated arts and crafts-style house in Syracuse. While Sam doesn't fully comprehend her motive to end her marriage, it was "a force in motion that couldn't stop once it started."
Meanwhile, Sam is committed to finding the right post-election protest group ("The suggested Caning, Fermentation, and Preserving seemed to exist at the Venn diagram crossover of far right and far left") as Wayward's dramas stack up around her. Just two examples: Sam witnesses an act of violence against a person of color on the streets of Syracuse, and her 16-year-old daughter takes up with a man who is almost 30. With finesse, side-eye and (applied sparingly) heart, Spiotta plays with the question of how a person who is determined to make the world a better place can also be utterly self-absorbed. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer