“An innovative work of climate fiction, a nuanced and empathic family story, and, for my money, the summer’s best novel thus far.”–NPR.org“The most oddly enticing novel you will read this year…Keenly satirical yet unashamedly tender.”–Wall Street Journal“Reminiscent of the family explorations of Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff…Full of brilliantly realized characters, Hauser’s … brilliantly realized characters, Hauser’s latest is profound, often incredibly funny, and captures the times like few other contemporary novels.”
—Booklist (starred)
When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap’s Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged, older half-sister, to help pick up the pieces. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. The Greys have been avoiding each other for a dozen years.
Elsa and Nolan travel to their father’s field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast. Here, their father’s fatalistic colleagues, the Reversalists, obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare sea duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse and humanity’s best days are behind us.
On an island that is always looking backward, it’s impossible for the siblings to ignore their past. Stuck together in the close quarters of their island stilt-house, and provoked by the absurd antics of the remaining Reversalists, years of family secrecy and blame between Elsa and Nolan threaten to ruin them all over again. As the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father’s final obsession, they begin to fear that they were their father’s first evidence that the future held no hope.
In the irreverent and exuberant spirit of Kevin Wilson, Alissa Nutting, and Karen Russell, CJ Hauser speaks to a generation’s uncertainties: Is it possible to live in our broken world with both scientific pragmatism and hope? What does one generation owe another? How do we know which parts of the past, and ourselves, to jettison and which to keep? Delightfully funny, fiercely original, high-spirited and warm, Family of Origin grapples with questions of nature and nurture, evolution and mating, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.
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A bold, strange novel, one that spirits readers to some of the furthest reaches of human experience. Wildly inventive and intensely moving.
CJ Hauser’s Family of Origin is strange in that way raw honesty often is. It is sharp in its prose and in how it can so cleanly make you feel pierced through. Hauser lures us to an island and from there we learn of family and loss and the nature of our essential humanity. Funny and unforgettable.
There is so much good in this novel: beautiful prose and scenery, unexpected and great characterization and family dynamics, an in-depth discussion of happy ducks, talks about space colonization, and the relentless pursuit of optimism and hope in a world that feels like it’s on fire.
Family of Origin is about two half-siblings, Elsa and Nolan, who reunite after many years and a fraught childhood to collect their recently deceased father’s things and try to find out what prompted his death: an apparent suicide. Their father, a genius biologist, had run off years earlier to join a cult-like group of scientists on an isolated island, all of them devoted to Reversalism: the theory that, discovered via observing the local undowny bufflehead duck population, evolution is running backward.
Family of Origin is told in a nonlinear format, with time skips from the present where the main plotline is happening to times in the past, ranging from various ages of the two main characters to the point of view of their father, to even the point of view of people from times past and even a time of no people. Normally non-chronological formats are really hard to pull off and can often feel pointless, but Family of Origin is a book about time and the fluidity of it. It’s the perfect novel to be nonlinear, and the author does a great job of making the distinction between past and present really clear and like it has a purpose.
I was initially wary going into a novel that seemed to revolve around hard science, which I often find dense at best and almost deliberately obtrusive at worst, but the author takes care not to confuse the reader. The cast is composed almost entirely of people who have devoted their life to the hard sciences, and yet they were all easy to understand and relatable. The concept of Reversalism is so unique and unlike any other fictional scientific theory I’ve ever come across as well. Through the ducks on the island losing their waterproof feathers, the scientists postulate that evolution is running backwards and life as we know it is getting worse, that our best days are gone by already.
This, of course, leads to the main conflict of the novel: if Elsa and Nolan’s father believed that their generation was inherently flawed, what does that say about his love for them? This concept goes far beyond this family. It’s inevitable that you come across the boomers vs. millennials discourse in online spaces, and this novel explores that tension in a way I’m surprised no other fictional novel has done. Are millennials automatically dumber, more consumed with petty things than our forefathers, who fought in world wars and brought in the technological revolution? Are we worse? Family of Origin tackles all of these questions and does so perfectly, to the point where even someone like me, not usually riled up by this kind of discussion, was tearing up reading about it.
The family dynamics are absolutely crazy, and Elsa and Nolan’s relationship is both touching and horrifying in equal measure, but overall the book is unlike anything I’ve ever read and I doubt I’ll read anything as original as it for a long time.
I’ll admit I’m a little biased; CJ is an old professor of mine I remember pretty fondly and who was always ready to help students out. So, great book, great author.
Much thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me a digital ARC of this book.
Funny, intriguing, real, tragic, and a wonderful resolution.
CJ Hauser’s Family of Origin is unexpected and beautiful and utterly propulsive. Set in a world where colonizing Mars is a possibility, where a group of scientists and misfits believe that evolution is running in reverse, where love is strange and changeable and astonishing, Family of Origin reveals a new, spectacular universe. I’ve never read anything quite like it.
In Family of Origin, CJ Hauser explores and explodes the most complex moments in life: those moments with a power that spirals both backward and forward in time, those moments that shift in meaning and shape us into who we are. This riveting and emotionally intricate book doesn’t shy away from the deepest questions about how a family, and a species, can survive.
Family of Origin is a meditation on a singularly unique family that opens up to embrace all of us, every single family, every human being, and it doesn’t let go. It’s amazing… a supremely weird novel that displays humor and heartbreak in equal measure.
Family of Origin is a novel full of wonders: a heartfelt, hilarious book about the possible end of a family, and the world, and how an obscure duck on an obscure island populated by obscure scientists might just save us all. There is some serious magic in these pages. All hail CJ Hauser, who has made us a funny, tender, and hopeful book, just when we need it the most.