Nora Lange’s debut Us Fools (Two Dollar Radio, 2024) tells of a swirling, claustrophobic American odyssey of two sisters, Bernie and Joanne “Jo”, set primarily in Illinois and Alaska. It spans four decades—the 70s to the aughts. It is narrated by the younger sister, Bernie, as she compiles and interprets her memories of their life together, writing from a Super 8 motel in Minnesota in 2009.
Born in the late 1970s to Sylvia Fareown—inheritor of a small Illinois farm and descendant of a notorious matriarchal line—and Henry, a troubled Vietnam veteran, Jo and Bernie spend their early years in an isolated one-bedroom farmhouse, where they develop their own private world, spending their time in a shared attic, roaming the farm fields naked, or nurturing an intense fixation with the daughter of a wealthy neighbor. Their education is an unconventional blend of high literature (Ovid, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Woolf) and farmyard practicality (how to cut the necks of chickens), set against a backdrop of their parents’ drinking, financial hardship, and loud sex.
The book is told in a series of short, thematic chapters that progress more or less with the arrow of time, though Lange often takes brief, sometimes disorienting leaps to future decades, or back through American history, or away from time altogether to riff on cows, passenger pigeons, plastics, consumerism, industrial farms, and America. More than plot, these chapters are bound by Bernie’s hilarious, clever, anxious voice. Each chapter offers its own short, disorienting burst of energy, like a series of manic, hilarious, anxiety-inducing nightmares: Jo describing the erection of the Thracian King who condemned Philomela, Jo stabbing Bernie with pencils, the two sisters mercy-killing cows with shotguns, Sylvia smoking menthols and chatting with a phone astrologer, Henry mired in depression throwing Sylvia against walls before unbuckling his pants. Jo and Bernie sometimes scheme their escape from this place of “bland food and a collapsing economy,” but more often they just watch TV (171). “While finances were fought over and parental sex happened . . . I watched television with a plastic bag over my head to contain my rage as my parents ignored the potential hazard of having a plastic bag over my face, while I listened to people in many places across America deny the farm crisis existed” (63). This peculiar existence continues until 1990, when financial hardship forces the family to abandon the farm for Chicago.
Novels do not inherently make arguments. But reviewers and jacket copywriters like to say they do, and we like to distill them down to rhetorical questions. Lange, through Bernie, offers readers two such questions: “What was it about the way my sister’s brain processed information that made people think it was okay to hurt her, or anyone else for that matter?” (256). And underneath that question: “What is our responsibility to others?” Specifically, Bernie wants to know what her responsibility is to her sister Joanne. The novel’s answer seems to be “taping” this book together in the Super 8 motel room (one of several reasons the book reminded of Shelia Heti’s How Should a Person Be?). More abstractly, our responsibility to others is not only to try to fathom, but to want to fathom, no matter how difficult, what it is like inside their heads, what it is like to be them, to be Joanne. The key ingredient to love and desire and care is endless, passionate curiosity. Through Bernie’s efforts to understand Jo, we readers learn what it looks like to abide by this responsibility, to recognize a loved one as an endless, amusing, frustrating, painful mystery worth going to the ends of the Earth (or the ends of our ropes) to better understand.
In this way, a novel that resides deep inside Bernie’s mind, is really a novel about Joanne. Joanne was “born speaking a language few wanted to understand.” But, “I wanted to understand,” Bernie tells us (124). Joanne is truly wild—often naked, romping about the farm fields, or in the farmhouse. As a child she puts all of herself into trying to seduce and please Seraphina, while she effortlessly seduces her father’s friends (e.g. at twelve she made these men compete for her affection in a sperm whale drawing competition) and plots sea escapes with Bernie. Though no explicit violence befalls Jo in these prepubescent years, the possibility is palpable, as Jo spirals from depression to mania to transcendence and back around. As Bernie puts it: “From a very young age, it was clear to me that animals and people—girls, Hawks, goldfish, boys, men, cows, women—would be drawn to my sister. . . Jo was born a cannon. She emerged an energy. She was a force that levitated and left a mess behind which others would fall over themselves to clean up but nobody had the tools to do this well or the willingness to help her” (147). Us Fools is a story about how far (Alaska, a Super 8 motel in Minnesota) Bernie will go to better understand this “energy”. For Bernie, that is what it means to love Jo in the right way, for Bernie is convinced Joanne’s mind holds some key to understanding her own.
After the move to Chicago, Joanne and Bernie begin to drift apart. Bernie befriends the dad-bodied next-door neighbor, who she calls Hello, and for a while considers sleeping with him. But near the end of Bernie’s high school years, it’s Joanne who disappears into Hello’s house, and begins a mysterious, unhealthy multi-year relationship with the fifty-year-old man.
In Joanne’s absence, Bernie and the book are briefly liberated from the claustrophobia of its tight swirling wildness. And yet, Joanne’s disappearance saps the book of its electricity and sets both Bernie and the reader adrift. And now the reviewer’s been seduced too. What a masterful magic trick. Bring back Jo! Lange creates in the reader the same urgent curiosity for the mind of the missing sister that afflicts Bernie. Increasingly adrift and worried, Bernie knocks on Hello’s door and asks to speak with her. Jo meets Bernie in the backyard and tells her she never wants to see her again.
But when Jo is caught freeing animals from the city zoo, the police inform the family that Jo’s been put in a psychiatric hospital (I know it sounds excessive and ridiculous, and it is, but somehow it’s also just right). They pass on a handwritten note from Jo saying she no longer knows how to “store the information,” she is “at capacity” (252).
The novel itself often feels at capacity, trying but not quite knowing what to do with all the information coursing through a life lived with a sister like Joanne, with parents like Henry and Sylvia, in a country like America, in a countryside like rural Illinois, in a city like Chicago, in a desolate town like Deadhorse, Alaska.
The institutionalization and compulsory pills do not go well for Jo, and in one of the more moving scenes in the book, Henry smuggles her out of the hospital. Back at the apartment it is decided they will buy Jo a trailer in a remote town in northern Alaska, a truly wild place where she might be able to find the nothingness she needs, as if she were a lapsed mystic.
Bernie writes periodically to Jo in Alaska, while back in Chicago she teaches fifth and sixth graders about playwriting and works as a page of sorts for a wealthy poet. Years go by in this way and then Jo invites Bernie to Alaska. Bernie goes. She finds Jo unkempt but stable, in her small trailer, with a homemade greenhouse, a fledgling farm, and two suitors—the two clerks of the town’s lone general store. Bernie spends a long time in Alaska living with her sister. Like much of the book the timeline is unclear. Several months? A year? When she leaves, Cicero, the winning clerk, gifts Bernie his precious Rav4, which she drives all the way to Minnesota, to the Super 8, where she gathers her thoughts and memories into something. Us Fools perhaps.
Us Fools is the kind of book you have to learn how to read, as with most fiction that is genuinely original. The book has this feel as if it’s been emitted from a wild, alien intelligence. This can be both thrilling and frustrating, as it circles and darts and bucks and jilts. Sentences often don’t line up. Joints become blunts within a single paragraph. Continuity errors abound as we pass through the mental landscape of Bernie-Jo, as if they are a single entity, one monstrous child-creature—hungry, curious, sarcastic, confused, silly, over-educated, colliding with market forces, annoyed by adults, and forced to grow up too soon. Junk kids, is the name Jo devised for what they are. While attending the University of Chicago, with Jo shacked up with Hello, Bernie tries briefly to separate herself mentally from Jo, but ultimately cannot, for Jo is “embedded in my skull . . . blurry, vibrating in opposing directions at once” (187). That is an effect Lange consistently achieves when the two sisters are on the page at once.
The novel shares some DNA with Joy Williams’ Harrow in its portrayal of precocious children critiquing their own destructive species. It echoes Rachel Cusk’s observer-narrator style, though with a more surreal tone and louder humor. Like Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, Us Fools explores sisterhood and mental illness through a manic, wide-ranging voice while examining the effects of financial collapse on a dysfunctional family. There are also traces of Philip Roth’s biographical novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Sabbath’s Theatre) in the book’s circular, accumulative style and in its resistance to putting down the mask of irony.
In a text fight with her internet boyfriend, Preston, Bernie is accused of not knowing “when to stop and come into focus” (290). At times the novel suffers for this lack of focus. Bernie’s shapeshifting mostly works. In fact it is often electric and genuinely surprising. It serves the book’s exploration of a fast, unstable mind roving through so much time and space. But occasionally the book seems to flinch at the last second, opting for a joke or a social critique instead of pushing deeper into the radical intimacy it’s made space for, pulling on a mask instead removing one. Bernie never quite comes into focus. This, of course, makes her who she is. And many of us never take off our masks. Many of us do not know we are even wearing them. And that may be the case with Bernie. Inside that Super 8 room she certainly tries to take off a mask. But the mask, she realizes, is Jo, and it is a part of her, forever.
