Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As with her last novel, The Invention of Everything Else (2007), Hunt shows her skill in transforming the trappings of a factual story into a fantastical one more compelling and richer than the original. Mr. Splitfoot, loosely based on the Fox sisters, mediums from New York, revolves around Nat and Ruth, inseparable charges at the Love of Christ foster home. Revolting against the draconian and darkly whimsical Father Arthur, Nat and Ruth stage séances for the other orphans. When a traveling salesman, Mr. Bell, overhears them at one of the séances and offers to act as their agent, Nat and Ruth leave the orphanage, though they find new perils on the outside in particular, a zealot who becomes infatuated with Ruth. Hunt moves between Nat and Ruth's story and events set 20 years later, when Cora, Ruth's niece, discovers she's pregnant, and Ruth, now mysteriously mute, silently leads Cora away from her home without saying where or why they are going. The narratives collide in a haunting finish. Nat and Ruth's seeming helplessness imbues the story with an eerie sense of danger, though Hunt expertly juxtaposes this against moments of tenderness and love. Motherhood, religious zeal, poverty, predation, and the frailty yet relentlessness of life are among the rich themes that Hunt explores here. Liberally deconstructed sentences, which to some readers may prove taxing, will for others be just the thing to activate the book's fantastical qualities.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE ABUNDANCE: Narrative Essays Old and New, by Annie Dillard. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Dillard selects 22 of her best pieces from the past four decades, including dispatches from coastal Maine and a New Age Catholic church. Across these essays, "her preferred method is to transform, through the alchemy of metaphor, natural phenomena into spiritual ones," Donovan Hohn said here. EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. (Broadway, $17.) In this wrenching account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, chronicles eight impoverished families around Milwaukee for whom eviction is a near-constant fear. While these tenants live in squalor, their landlords and others profit from their misfortune; the book casts light on how the poor are regularly exploited. NOT IN GOD'S NAME: Confronting Religious Violence, by Jonathan Sacks. (Schocken, $16.95.) Sacks, a rabbi, argues that religion must be part of the solution to combating what he sees as politicized religious extremism. Drawing on Genesis for guidance, he outlines an argument that justice and decency should prevail over loyalty toward one's own group. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS, by Edna O'Brien. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) A mysterious outsider arrives in a small Irish town, leaving residents at turns curious and skeptical. There's reason for concern: He's a Balkan War criminal, but succeeds in transfixing the locals, who view him as a healer or holy man, until his secret comes out. His relationship with a young woman, her naïveté dispelled, threatens to upend her life, but she gains strength and confidence from the ordeal. O'Brien's "unsettling fabulist vision" recalls "Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode," our reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, wrote here. MR. SPLITFOOT, by Samantha Hunt. (Mariner, $14.95.) Ruth and Nat, two orphans in a foster home headed by a religious fanatic, discover an ability to speak to the dead; when a con man learns of their talent, he's eager to profit from it. In alternating chapters, the story jumps to the present day, when Ruth - who has become eerily mute - lures her pregnant niece on a journey by foot across New York State. SUDDEN DEATH, byÁIvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Riverhead, $16.) In a novel bursting with historical figures - Galileo, Anne Boleyn, Caravaggio - 16th-century monks imbue tennis matches with spiritual import; a French executioner is himself executed; and Spanish conquistadors carry out their bloody siege of Mexico, a merger of civilizations with "planetary aftershocks."D
Excerpts
Far from here, there's a church. Inside the church, there's a box. Inside the box is Judas's hand." Nat is slight and striking as a birch branch. "Who cut it off?" Ruth asks. "How?" But Nat's a preacher in a fever. His lesson continues with a new topic. "Baby deer have no scent when they are born." Nat conducts the air. "Keeps those babies safe as long as their stinking mothers stay far away." This is how Nat loves Ruth. He fills her head with his wisdom. "My mom doesn't stink." "You don't even know who your mom is, Ru." "Of course I do. She's a veterinarian. She already had too many animals when I was born." "I don't believe you." Ruth looks left, then right. "OK. She's a bank robber. When you're asleep, she brings me money." "Where's all the cash, then? Are you hiding it in some big cardboard box?" So Ruth swerves again, returning to the version of a mother she uses most often. "I mean my mom's a bird, a red cardinal." "A male? Your mom's a boy?" "Yeah." "No, she isn't. She's a stone. Bones. I spit on her." Nat steals confidence from thin air. Ruth pulls her long dress tight across bent knees. She doesn't even know enough about mothers to fabricate a good one. Her idea of a mother is like a non-dead person's idea of heaven. It must be great. It must be huge. It must be better than what she's got now. "I'm just saying, wherever she is, she doesn't stink." Nat flips the feathers of his hair. "Wherever she is. Exactly." He holds his hand in a ray of sunlight. "I'm here now." He lifts the hand that touched light up to her ear, squeezing the lobe, an odd, familiar affection between their bodies. Nat touches the scar on her face, tangled knots of tissue, keloids dots on her nose and cheeks. "Do you know how they deliver mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon?" "No." "I taught you this before. Please." Nat is cruel or Nat is gentle. Nat hates/loves Ruth as much as he hates/loves himself. He'll say, "Sleep on the floor tonight" or "I'm taking your blue coat. I like it" or "Stop crying right now." But he'll also say, "Eat this" and "You can dance, girl" and "Stay the fuck away from Ruth, or I'll slice your ear cartilage off and give it to a dog to chew on." When the Father raises a switch, Nat gives his back. "Are you just someone who wants to stay stupid?" "No. Tell me." "Mules." She wrinkles her nose. "Don't believe me? You're welcome to shop elsewhere." "I believe you. You're the only shop in town." They are alone in Love of Christ!'s bright living room. They are happiest when they are alone together. "Tell me what you know about light." "Not much." "It's the fastest thing in the world." "Faster than Jesus?" "Way faster than Jesus." Dust turns before her eyes. "OK. I believe you." Nat looks right at her, smiles. "What killed Uncle Sam?" She imagines a forgotten relative, an inheritance, a home. "Who's that?" "Samuel Wilson, the meatpacking man once called Uncle Sam. Symbol of our nation? He's buried just down the road apiece. You didn't even know Uncle Sam was dead." "I didn't know Uncle Sam was a real person. What killed him?" "Stupidity, girl. Stupidity." His, she wonders, or mine? Nothing is near here, upstate New York. The scope of the galaxy seems reasonable. Light, traveling ten thousand years to reach Earth, makes sense because from here even the city of Troy, three miles away, is as distant as Venus. What difference could ten thousand light years make? Nat and Ruth have never been to Manhattan. The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission is a brick bear spotted with mange. Handiwork from days past? -- ?ledge and brace doors, finger-joint chair rails, and hardwood floors? -- ?is being terrorized by state-provided, institutional, indestructible furniture common to dormitories and religious organizations. The house's wooden floors are smooth as a gun butt. In summer Drosophila melanogaster breed in the compost pile. Each snaggletooth of a homestead constructed during the Civil War pleases Father Arthur, lord of the domain, founder of Love of Christ! "Hand of the creator," he says. Clapboards that keep out only some of the wind; sills that have slipped off square; splinters as long as fingers. The house is always cold with a useless hearth since the State frowns on foster home fireplaces. "Meddlers!" Father Arthur unleashed his rage against bureaucracy, using a sledge on the innocent, elderly chimney. Now once a day when the sun reaches alignment, a sliver of light shines into the house through the busted-up flue, a precise astronomical calendar if anyone knew how to read it. At Love of Christ! children feel the Lord, and the Lord is often furious and unpredictable, so Father Arthur cowers from corrupting influences. No Walt Disney, soda pop, or women's slacks pass his threshold. The children milk goats, candle and collect eggs, preserve produce, and make yogurt from cultures they've kept alive for years. Blessed be the bacteria. The children remain ignorant of the bountiful mysteries filling the nearby Price Chopper. Boys at Love of Christ! wear black cotton pants and solid tops from a limited palette of white, tan, or brown. The girls wear plain dresses last seen on Little House on the Prairie reruns. Simple fabric, a few pale flowers, a modest length for working. Fingernails are clean and rounded. Teeth are scrubbed with baking soda. The old ways survive, and seasonal orders dictate. But? -- ?like the olivine-bronzite chondrite meteor that surprised a Tomhannock Creek farmer back in 1863? -- ?corruption has a way of breaking through. New charges arrive with words from the outside: mad cow disease, La-Z-Boy recliner, Barbie doll. "You know what Myst is?" Ruth asks Nat. "M.I.S.T. Yes. A secretive branch of the Marines. Surprised you've heard of it." He works with more confidence than facts. "I thought it was a video game." "Video game? What's that?" When they had mothers, Nat's read him books and fed him vitamins until a bad man bit off the tip of her right breast and told her he'd be back for the left one. She didn't stop driving until she reached New York State. She left Nat at a babysitter's house, disappearing with a hero from the personal ads, a man who appreciated firm thighs more than tiny kids and perfect breasts. Nat set fire to his first group home. No one died. Ruth never knew her mom, but when she was young, her sister, Eleanor, lived at Love of Christ! El was like a mom. She petted Ruth at night, told Ruth she was beautiful despite the messed-up scar on her face. "When you were a baby," El said, "you used to point at birds." Then Eleanor turned eighteen. "Real sorry." The Father woke them with a fist on the door. "Time to go." El jumped up. Ruth froze cold. She was only five. El stalled her departure in the driveway, but Ruth didn't appear. "Bye," El spoke to the house. No sign of Ruth. No blood vow to find one another once El got settled. It would be a long time before El would be able to come for her, if El, an unemployed eighteen-year-old, would ever be able to come for her five-year-old sister. Ruth breathed into the window upstairs, looked down on the driveway scene, a surgery in some anatomy theater removing the only familiar thing she'd ever known. El was leaving in the truck. Ruth had no idea where it would take her. A bus station? The YWCA? Some mall parking lot in the capital with eighty bucks and a crucifix from the Father in her bag? Ruth pushed harder into the pane. A black thread, lashed around the chrome bumper, yanked an organ from Ruth's chest, dragged it in the dirt behind the Father's truck like a couple of gory beer cans. Ruth said nothing for two weeks. No one noticed. Eventually the State brought the Father a replacement, a boy named Nat who'd had trouble with matches and kerosene. The Word became flesh and lived among them. The Word became flesh and lived among them. "You can be my sister now," Ruth told him. That was the Word. Excerpted from Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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