Where From, Going Where? Multi-Generational Novels

 I do not know that I am writing multigenerational stories with my Webster County stories. It has worked out that way, sort of. What they are not is of a diaspora, but the place from which people depart. That has been the reality I lived through since 1978. 

When General Motors began laying off people in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Anderson bled people. The same is, I think, also true of New Castle and Marion and Muncie and Kokomo - the cities dependent on the automobile business. Those who could get out went.

Samira Madwar's Why So Many Authors Are Writing Multigenerational Stories (The Walrus) approaches the subject differently than what I have (including getting published!), but for all that, it gives me much to think about my stories and my history.

Each of the titles is remarkable, with characters who grapple with displacement and diasporic living in ways that feel particularly resonant in this moment. By this moment, I mean several things. Like me, the authors are all millennials; our generation is now approaching middle age and all the attendant questions about where we’ve come from and where we’re going. While I’ve read plenty of multigenerational family fiction in the past, the genre has taken on new meaning for me now that I’m a parent, worried about what kind of world my kid will inherit. Each story confronts the theme of intergenerational trauma—a topic that’s received heightened attention in recent years—and how it exerts a force that many of us can barely perceive. And each of these stories was motivated, at least in part, by the missing pieces in the authors’ own family trees.

***

In some ways, her story sets the stage for the future of ancestry. Inherent in all these stories—Estima’s, Oza’s, and Sealy’s—is the impossibility of truly returning to one’s ancestral home. I think about this often: the country I grew up in has been ravaged by war. Even if I were to take my kid there one day, I can’t show her the place I remember because it no longer exists. For her sake as much as mine, I wish I could at least tell her about the people who form her roots there.

****

But fiction, of course, has its limits. As I write this, I’m thinking of the records of entire families, neighbourhoods, and communities being obliterated, whether by war or other crises, their family trees hacked apart. Novels and short stories cannot restore those bonds, but they might be the only way to process the unfathomable. I wonder how future writers will fill the silences. 

 I see that last paragraph as a call to arms and a path to a theme.

sch 2/3