[Wiggins'] characters are given to the lively, comic backtalk of the golden-age Hollywood movies often filmed nearby. Tonally, this is tricky to reconcile with the running of a concentration camp ... Ms. Wiggins stresses that her characters are all honorable people doing their best in a bad situation, even working together to provide seed money and business opportunities for the dispossessed prisoners. The vigor and sweep of her writing has real rhetorical potency. I still don’t think this is a fit subject for Greatest Generation heroics but Properties of Thirst comes as close as anything will to persuading me.
... [a] legitimately great American novel ... This is a big, bold book, generous of spirit and packed with prose that gleefully breaks the rules ... Wiggins’ gifts are many, but most important here is her knack for weaving the personal into larger historical currents, in this case domestic concerns during World War II ... has many modes, ranging from tragedy to screwball comedy ... a seamless, inspired whole ... Wiggins’ writing glides off the page in an onslaught of stylistic flourishes writers are often told not to use: italics, consecutive colons, ellipses, em dashes, paragraphs that go on for pages at a time. But there’s nothing terribly showy about Properties of Thirst. It speaks to the heart as well as the head and conjures characters to whom you won’t want to say goodbye.
Novels, purporting to be the next necessary heart-wrenching tale of wartime heroism, are seemingly everywhere, but rarely do they live up to expectations.Properties of Thirst defies, dispels and demolishes those expectations and biases in the best way ... Masterful ... Readers won't be able to look away ... Wiggins' writing, which can be fragmented or polished depending on the page, opens up microscopic universes and sprawling landscapes alike. It's a joy to read.
Vibrant characters, multiple storylines, and a visceral sense of time and place coalesce in this engrossing novel ... In lush language, Wiggins evokes a keen sense of history and its life altering effects, a righteous frustration with government deception, and faith in the power of love to quench one’s deepest thirsts.
[A] grand novel ... Expansive, gloriously symphonic, intricately patterned ... Loss, desire, moral dilemmas, reflection, and zesty dialogue with the do-good energy of Frank Capra films generate a WWII home front tale of profound and far-ranging inquiry and imagination, scintillating humor, intrepid romance, and conscience.
Properties of Thirst is sprawling, rich, deep, passionate, beautiful, and as big as one of its key protagonists, the six-foot-plus California rancher Rocky Rhodes, and the vast mountain ranges he loves. Author Marianne Wiggins, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, knows how to craft an absorbing story with full-bodied characters and immersive descriptions ... even at 544 pages, this novel is too thin for all the themes and subplots that it tries to tackle ... With so many pivotal characters ranging across so much territory, it’s no wonder Wiggins can’t follow every plot or theme to its fullest ... the literary world is fortunate that Wiggins managed to complete this amazing novel.
A powerful epic ... The dialogue is full of grit, and Wiggins manages to capture a big swath of mid-century America by placing a blue-blooded family into a desert inland complete with adobe haciendas, desert blooms, and Hollywood movie sets, while throughout, the Rhodes hold out hope for Stryker’s survival. Wiggins’s masterpiece is one for the ages.
Sweeping, cinematic ... Languid, linguistically lush and lyrical ... Wiggins’ interwoven plotlines...and colorful characters are entrancing and as cinematic as the real-life Westerns that were filmed in the valley in which the book is primarily set. But what makes the novel soar is the way Wiggins can evoke landscapes both interior and exterior, especially the expansive valley that has come to exemplify America’s best qualities—and its worst. This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.
