C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel draws its title from a Japanese phrase signifying ephemerality, but it doubles as a description of New Orleans after Katrina. As a fictional retelling thereof, the book has few superiors ... The author resists the temptation to turn her novel into a tract or advocacy—not that it lacks passion. To the contrary, the novel is very much of our irritable, harried times.
With a gripping yet deliberate narrative infused with vivid descriptions, Babst takes her time with this story, allowing it to build slowly and methodically with an appropriate weight, enhancing the confusion wrought by the storm. In contrast, Cora's point of view significantly intensifies the pace, lending an urgency to the novel and making her narrative feel almost cyclonic. A native of New Orleans who evacuated one day before Hurricane Katrina, Babst has an intimate understanding and knowledge of the region's people and rich culture, its topography and the complex forces of race and class. The result is in a timely debut novel about the power of nature and its omnipresent potential for destruction in every aspect of our lives.
Babst takes on the Herculean feat of describing the interior lives of her characters against a jumbled panorama of destruction so vast that no single photograph could ever encompass it ... The travails of Cora and Adelaide include more than one pressing mystery to be solved, and Babst is adept at building suspense. But at times she muffles the action with an accumulation of detail that appears forced...Add to that a dizzying array of flashbacks and dream sequences, and momentum flags. What's more, Babst brings the reader so close to her characters that intimacy periodically comes at the expense of basic logistics ... The Floating World shines spectacularly, however, when Joe's father Vincent Boisdoré comes into view.
There are moments of great beauty and power in the book. Babst succeeds in tracing New Orlean’s social and racial divisions to their root, providing withering commentary on a murderously oblivious white upper-class that still uses words like 'octoroon' in polite society. She is also a particularly dexterous writer, weaving from past to present in the course of a single paragraph or sentence without losing steam or distracting the reader. The density of the book’s prose works to mirror in her characters’ tangled thoughts the devastate ... Yet there is an unfortunate side effect of treating the storm as an enormous metaphor. In granting the storm such symbolic weight, Babst tends to ignore the enormous material cost the storm—aided and accelerated by human interference and negligence—wrought on the lives of New Orleanians, particularly its black residents. The book contains only glancing references to the horrors that descended upon the city after the levees broke ... It’s almost as though Babst, realizing the storm was too large to adequately represent in a single novel, decided to turn the storm into the overwrought backdrop upon which she could set a series of smaller, more manageable tragedies.
The mystery of the death propels the novel in a zigzag fashion, flashing back to the storm and then leaping forward in time to a hard-earned resolution. The force of Katrina has opened old wounds among the Boisdorés, and tangents in the story brush against marital infidelity, mental health and biases in class and race. Ms. Babst has a delicate way of depicting souls confronted by more hardship than they can bear, but the cataract of fears and grievances can make for punishing reading. Troy likens the flood to a great welling-up of sorrow. Once a feeling that powerful breaches the levees erected to contain it, it becomes all-consuming.
At the heart of The Floating World is a mystery. The novel begins with a scene so vivid as to be disorienting … Babst has set many dramas in motion. Bit players and backstories abound, and minor plot twists are too numerous to count … Cora’s singular presence makes a lasting impression. Her enigmatic silence, her fragmented memories of the storm and the shotgun, reach a striking climax in the novel’s middle section, which is an evocation of the storm itself told in the third person from Cora’s perspective. Far from being a victim, Cora emerges here as an agent. She is scared but resolute, selfless to a fault as she ventures into the floodwaters to rescue the stranded and find the missing. In telling Cora’s story, Babst subverts any simple notions about victimhood in the eye of a storm and explores the possibilities for growth such extraordinary circumstances afford.
Sometimes the sense of loss becomes almost oppressive. In reality the storm’s impact was unrelenting, no doubt, but Babst is most effective at conveying the emotional weight of the tragedy when she presents it alongside vibrant characters and story lines ... Any novel of the South has to grapple with race at least implicitly, and The Floating World doesn’t shy from the subject... So it was wise on Babst’s part to introduce the poorer Troy and Reyna to a book about Katrina — a storm that touched so many poor African-American lives, after all. Unfortunately, Reyna rarely rises above stereotype, either sentimentalized by Cora or demonized by Troy ... Still anyone who has experienced loss will be hard hit by Babst’s expert descriptions.
Babst effectively evokes the sense of unreality and powerlessness of survivors in a ruined city. She combines powerful imagery, a complex but well-crafted plot and deeply engaging characters to convey the enduring and sometimes surprising impact of a disaster like Katrina.
This novel is New Orleans to the bone, an authentic, detailed picture of the physical and emotional geography of the city, before, during, and after the tragedy, its social strata, its racial complications, the zillion cultural details that define its character: the parrots in the palm trees, the pork in the green beans, the vein in the shrimp, 'the goddamned tacky way he flew his Rex flag out of season.' Deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina.
...[a] tightly written debut ... Babst skillfully makes the reader feel Del’s desperate fears about Cora and the sisters’ frustrations with their elders. She’s also adept at pitting Tess’s pushy nature against Joe’s more passive tendencies. Despite a discordant ending, this is a riveting novel about the inescapable pull of family.
