Master storyteller Jonathan Evison's seventh novel is a sweeping epic set over 170 years of United States history, a mosaic of intimate stories of 20 main characters whose dreams and labors built the nation. Small World examines the injustices they endure, while celebrating the glory of the American spirit.
The novel opens in 2019 as Oregon Amtrak conductor Walter Bergen drives his last route before retiring. The next chapter, set on a roiling ship crossing the Atlantic to New York in 1851, introduces the Bergens of County Cork, desperate for a new life "on the other side of the Golden Door." Short chapters from the mid-1800s follow diverse Americans, including Wu Chen, who left China for California's "Golden Mountain"; the enslaved Othello of Kentucky, whose master imagines the "small world it shall be" when the railroad joins the East and West, a hope that excludes Othello; and Luyu, a Miwok native whose people were forced to labor for white captors. The Bergen twins, Nora and Finn, cruelly separated as orphans, nurture a lifelong hope to reunite, even as Finn joins the team of Irishmen building the transcontinental railroad.
Modern stories are interspersed with the historic. The 2019 Amtrak carries passengers whose forebears' paths brought them together, and Evison (Lawn Boy) craftily incorporates subtle clues to the genealogy linking the centuries. Rather than feeling disjointed, the fast-paced back-and-forth of the novel underscores the image of the "small world" that is the United States, with its heartwarming dreams achieved, its still-deferred hopes, and the diverse protagonists, whom readers will miss when their epic story ends. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.