The New Inheritors is the third mesmerizing historical novel by Kent Wascom, all of them set around the rim of the gulf and tracing an American dynasty, a family that begins with a penniless pioneer and, in three generations, accrues great wealth and bloody secrets ... His style and subjects echo great Southern writers like William Faulkner and Harry Crews, continuing a tradition of recounting terrible things in deliriously beautiful language.
The third in a projected quartet, following Secessia (2015), Wascom’s latest literary saga is his strongest yet ... Wascom’s writing burns with a raw, elemental power. The story encompasses the era’s white privilege and anti-immigrant stances, letting readers make the contemporary connections, while pondering what it means to be American.
Again, this book feels completely different than the other two and yet—now that we know his writing—is fully identifiable as belonging to this author ... Stretches of the novel are infused with a sense of light, air, and hopefulness that are entirely missing from the first two. It’s a setup, certainly, to provide a contrast between the surface beauty and the ugliness that lurks just out of sight ... as well as a contrast between the time before, in happiness, and the time after, in misery. Still, we, like the characters, can bask in the golden light while it shines ... If there is a weakness to The New Inheritors, it’s an unevenness in pacing that makes it feel at times that Wascom is in a hurry to move on. I, for one, did not want him to hurry; the beauty and richness of his observation and detail when he dives deep made me long for more.
Wascom writes stunning prose, especially of the seascape and shorebirds that Isaac loves to draw; the author portrays the New Orleans underworld and soldiers of fortune in equally vivid terms. Violence is a crucial element, and there’s plenty of it. Wascom apparently wishes to show how greed, lust for power, and jealousy cause bloodletting, and how new life blithely occupies the space once held by the dead ... With a brilliant exception of the scenes during the war years, The New Inheritors evokes no particular era and thus feels groundless as historical fiction. I’m not sure the marvelous prose rescues the book for lovers of the literary, either; I found it a struggle to finish.
Kent Wascom is one of the most exciting and ambitious emerging voices in American fiction ... in The New Inheritors, he has written his most powerful and poignant novel yet ... The New Inheritors explores the beauty and burden of what is handed down to us all. At once a love story and a family drama, a novel of nature and a novel of war, The New Inheritors traces a family whose life is intimately tied to the Gulf, that most disputed, threatened, and haunted part of this country we call America.
Having captured the history of the Gulf Coast in two bloody, blazingly and baroquely brilliant sagas, award-winning author Wascom returns with an update set in 1914. Mysterious painter Isaac and rebellious heiress Kemper fall in love and find refuge in the coastal wilds, but brawly summer storms and violence both worldwide and down home (rivalries within Kemper’s brutal family boil over) wreck their happiness.
Wascom (Secessia, 2015, etc.) delivers a lyrical, emotionally charged study of life along the Gulf Coast a century past ... The best moments of this very good book are those in which Wascom writes with sententious but not sentimental poetry ... Family drama and love story, Wascom’s latest is evidence of an evolving talent. Look for more.
