Badlands brings us searingly close to two painful losses, the wholeness of the body and the survival of a people. But Cynthia Reeves makes the experience cathartic through her gorgeously wrought prose and her profoundly empathic spirit. This is a fierce book, and a brave one. I came to the end of it enriched and grateful.
Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After and Half a Heart
C.J. Hribal, author of The Company Car and The Clouds in Memphis
Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Double-Wide
Diane Glancy, author of Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea
Winner of the 2006 Miami University Press Novella Contest . . .
Badlands portrays the twenty-four-year marriage of Caro and Daniel Singleman—the marriage that was, is, and might have been. As the dying Caro confronts a night of crisis, the couple attempt to reshape the present by reconstructing the past through the interleaving of memory, hallucination, and dream. In this fraught terrain, Badlands explores two human mysteries—the inscrutability of the heart and the persistence of hope in the face of overwhelming loss.
Cynthia Reeves’s Badlands is a marvel, a visceral and electrifying interweaving of several narratives that are, ultimately, one narrative. In this powerful and complex novella, Reeves expertly renders Caro’s hallucinatory encounters with her own past and with an historical past filled with travesties of decency and justice. Stunning for its complexity, depth and emotional resonance, this is a story of love and betrayal and still more love. Wrenching, rigorous, tender—Badlands is not to be missed.
Cynthia Reeves’s extremely appealing novella, Badlands, does not unfold so much as it exfoliates, exhumes. Archeology, the book’s conceit, composes the breccia of the book’s stratified form and epochal prose. In layers, in style and in content, Reeves reveals and reveals again—sub-dermal, subconscious, sublime. One rich dig indeed.
Badlands has a dream-like quality that moves back and forth, here and there, between a contemporary relationship and the hard facts of history. . . . This unique journey alternates between a wife’s illness and the equally horrific events of the past as one time period blends into another.
“The beauty in death, the past rushing in to meet the present, and the trick of the morphine-cajoled memory, renders Badlands reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s TheEnglish Patient, but without the cinematic grandeur, the breathless romance or the tease of a happy ending. Instead, Reeves writes of loss in sharply gorgeous language with no measures taken to spare the reader from life’s cruelest moments.”
