A review by tumblehawk
The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka

5.0

It was hard not to return again and again to the phrase “Great American Novel” in reading this. That’s a phrase I often roll my eyes at. But this epic feminist tale of sisterhood, family, struggle, the quest for self-determination...yeah. This is a real window into America. I first encountered Vanessa Veselka not through her writing but her teaching. Soon after moving to Portland I took a workshop co-led by her and Lidia Yuknavitch called “Cash, Class, and Writing America.” What I learned (or tried to learn) in that class is on full display here, masterfully. The lives of the characters at the core of this novel are lives lived under the financial realities and pressures of contemporary America. These are characters looking to make meaning of their lives but finding that quest all too often subsumed by the need to simply survive. There’s a really fascinating thing happening with time in this novel. Veselka’s first novel ZAZEN was often really dense and thick for me, hard to plow through. Things moved slow and thick. This book moves for the most part at a breakneck pace, the plot of it is fairly flying at your face, but the characters are sort of circling the drain much of the time, trapped in centrifugal forces. Meanwhile, there are departures—the narrative voice pulls back to a deep, wide, even ancient knowing, that renders historical time and, beyond that, natural time/geologic time in strata that are much deeper, wider, moving with oozy thickness. It has this telescoping effect, making our human lives feel at once small and at the same time so very individually epic. There is such poetry in these moments that I was often stunned into rereading such passages. Just a beautiful book. And while I may call it a Great American Novel I also want to point out that it resists Freytag’s pyramid, resists predictable plotting, in ways that may leave some readers unfulfilled; but it just felt true to me.