Painting Beyond Walls

August 1, 2022
A thought-provoking meditation on human relationships at the cellular level as well as our relationship to Earth, the cosmos, and life itself. Midwestern novelist Rhodes' latest work is a return to the fictional town of Words, Wisconsin, the setting for Driftless (2008) and its sequel, Jewelweed (2014). The novel opens in the near-future Chicago of 2027, where the reader is introduced to August Helm, a 30-year-old biochemist working in a research facility at the University of Chicago. After having his position eliminated due to budget cuts and enduring a devastating breakup, August impulsively abandons the big city to return to his hometown in rural Wisconsin, a home he last saw years ago. Although much remains the same (as things do in small Midwestern towns), a new luxury housing development called Forest Gate has been built practically on top of Words, and the locals tolerate the wealthy, gentrifying "Gaters" with varying degrees of grace, suspicion, and resentment. Despite this, August ends up house-sitting for Forest Gate resident April Lux and promptly falls in love with her. A pervasive strangeness begins to permeate the narrative at about the halfway mark; the final third incorporates elements of science fiction and mystery, and what may have seemed to be a meandering narrative picks up steam and accelerates toward a satisfying--and weirdly surprising--conclusion. Rhodes has a knack for writing acute psychological realism; these characters live and breathe, and by the time the novel ends we feel like we know them. Additionally, several story arcs reveal a humanistic, righteous indignation regarding the violence toward women so endemic to Western civilization, and characters frequently engage in thought-provoking discussions of everything from cellular science to sexual politics and world economies. The epilogue recalls Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles (2000), albeit much more optimistic. Although elements of the novel are adjacent to the near-future SF of writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Rhodes is primarily concerned with the timeless human phenomena of love, loss, origins, family, and community. A consoling and melancholic reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Starred review from September 15, 2022
Rhodes' novels about the small, modest town of Words, Wisconsin, are in accord with the place-anchored, morally and spiritually inquisitive fiction of Kent Haruf and Marilynne Robinson even as this fourth installment, set in the very near future, takes a surprising turn. The young characters in Jewelweed (2013) are now adults burdened with painful experiences. August, a biochemist whose life in Chicago imploded, returns home after ten years away and is stunned by Forest Gate, a decadent, heavily patrolled climate-crisis refuge for the wealthy. August's thoughts are compulsively scientific as he analyzes human behavior, especially sexuality, giving rise to lecturing passages in the Daniel Quinn mode, interrogating the interplay of biology, society, and self. Hanh is haunted by her traumatic childhood in Vietnam during the war. Ivan, psychically scarred by horrific violence during a stint on a British Columbian pipeline, hates Forest Gate. But for all this rigorous interiority, a lot happens in a compressed time frame precipitated by August's infatuation with April, an enigmatic and powerful Forest Gate resident who harbors the strangest secret of all. Rhodes is rhapsodic in his descriptions and compassionate and wise in his observations, while his endearing, caring characters speak in peculiarly formal, even academic dialogue and the audacious plot veers into speculative territory and postulates far-fetched, if thought-provoking hope.

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