Lidia Yuknavitch’s extraordinary new novel is the weirdest, most mind-blowing book about America I’ve ever inhaled...Part history, part prophecy, all fever dream, Thrust offers a radical critique of the foundational ideals that conceal our persistent national crimes...As we march from Juneteenth to July 4, this is a story to scrub the patinated surface of our civic pride...In this dystopian vision of our drowned future, government functions have collapsed except, of course, the rabid pursuit of immigrants; that cause persists, the last shuddering movements of the body politic in its death throes...Amid this hellscape, we meet a strange little girl named Laisve, whose name means 'freedom' in Lithuanian, her frightened father hiding from the Raids...Yuknavitch’s descriptions of Brooklyn — now called simply the Brook — are incongruously precise and impressionistic, blending a dream’s concrete details floating in a cloud of terrors...As Thrust progresses, Yuknavitch drifts through several different storylines, separated by decades but threaded together by Laisve’s helpful visitations through the vast history of America’s halting struggle for freedom...Yuknavitch provides nothing less than a revised past and future of America with a vast new canon of attendant mythology...You might whine about the novel’s amorphous form, recurrent vagueness or multiple loose ends, but I read Thrust in a state of flustered fascination and finished longing to dream it again.
... forceful, fluid, erotic ... The chelonian wisdom he delivers can feel a little on the nose, a little over explicit. Of course it’s a wise old turtle spelling stuff out, I thought, when I was momentarily lifted from the magic of the book. Likewise, Laisvė is a collector, of objects, of information, and in her now-and-then recitals of facts, I couldn’t help but picture the author googling ... Which is in such contrast to much of the richness of the rest of the book, particularly the letter exchange between Aurora and her sculptor cousin, which is playful, fiery, intelligent, teasing, exploratory, and highly sexual. Yuknavitch captures the erotic imprinting that takes place when we’re children ... She places herself in the heated spot where violence and desire, pleasure and pain, intersect. She knows that the extreme states open doors to new places, portals to realms outside ourselves that allow us back in in new ways ... To term what occurs kink is perhaps to understate the way Yuknavitch presents the vast, explorable territory of our sexuality and the possibilities it offers to us ... People use the word 'braided' to describe books that plait different plotlines, voices, modes of storytelling. But braiding doesn’t feel accurate for what Yuknavitch is doing. In her work, our stories, our bodies — the two are inseparable for Yuknavitch — are not braided but bound, tied together by a thready net, joined like mycelium in a tangling spread athrob below the surface, knotted by ancestral ropes, umbilically linked forward and back. To know those binds, the torque and tug of them, is to have those fragmented parts — of ourselves, our histories, our countries, our world — pieced back together. In these binds, Yuknavitch shows us, what’s available, in a beautiful paradox, is the deepest kind of freedom.
... willfully difficult ... sprawling, fragmented structure calls centrality itself into question (as well as liberté, égalité and, most particularly, fraternité) ... Some of these passages feel preachy, like they’d better belong in The Nation than a novel ... It’s hard to buck the critical tide here — Yuknavitch elicits rapture in many readers — but also hard to maintain a grip on characters so obviously laden, heavy with meaning greater than themselves. Thrust is an indignant and impressive novel, but only in spurts an enjoyable one, and maybe that’s exactly the point. Some will hurl it unfinished across the room. Others will savor its elaborately orchestrated punishments.
Weaving these stories (and more) together, Thrust provides a scaffolding for a book that is part polemic, part alternate history and part science fiction, with two parts eroticism thrown in. It’s anything but linear, switching narratives and times with each chapter. Author Lidia Yuknavitch apparently subscribes to Aurora’s contention that stories gain strength where they cross each other, that there is no beginning, middle and end. I have never read a book quite like this, but I had no trouble staying intrigued.
There is nothing linear about Yuknavitch’s narrative—time being an entirely fluid element in the novel—and the language, descriptions, and metaphors are elaborate, lush, and very dream-like, often disorientingly so. A reader intent on deciphering a logical progression to the storyline will be disappointed: this is a story to give in to, to float through, to be carried along by ... Laisvė’s mission connects three fascinating substories, emerging interspersed with her own. In each intricately woven narrative, it is an overwhelming desire for liberty and release from the oppressive bonds of their individual social circumstances that motivates the characters ... Yuknavitch is unsparing in her criticism of American social hypocrisy ... Yuknavitch has so much to say in this haunting, elegiac novel, and it takes time to swim through it all and appreciate what she is trying to do. Some of the most powerful writing in Thrust concerns women’s bodies, rights, and freedoms: timely indeed ... this is a book of and for dark times.
... asks a thorny question about the purpose of a novel: what does one make of a book that teaches us how to read it so well that it reveals the limits of its own vision? ... Thrust’s formal devices follow the pattern of Laisvé’s underwater journeys, as the novel dives into one historical moment and then surfaces at another, sifting through the detritus of the ocean floor for hidden treasures that reveals another untold story. The intricacy of the novel’s architecture rewards multiple rereadings ... In many ways, this rendering felt true to life, in that to be nonwhite, for most of modern history, has meant to be both overlooked and scrutinized. And yet at times Yuknavitch’s narrativizing of these poles can feel exaggerated, almost dramatic ... the pains the author takes to represent accurately the stories Thrust draws upon is evident through her extensive research of primary and secondary sources about the people and eras the novel concerns. But, as she also acknowledges, there are 'unintentional distances' that 'exist in any human interaction that leads to bearing witness or representing the experiences of others.' Before we can create the cacophonous, polyvocal future that Thrust envisions, perhaps we must recognize how sometimes truly vast those 'unintentional distances” are. That throughout history, those “unintentional distances' themselves have occasionally contributed to the silencing of certain stories ... reflects the complexities of the novel as form and the story of its own becoming.
Thrust is kinky, queer, and razor sharp—Yuknavitch knots stirring stories of exploitation and hurt into a tapestry of human hubris and climate disaster, then sprinkles them with BDSM and female pleasure, absurd humor, and a whale named Bal, who swears she has never once swallowed a man...All this comes together to form a stunning novel about the future we might be able to create if we listen to voices we’ve previously ignored—a strange, emotional story about the rush of freedom, about welcoming in the world around us from earthworms to fungi, and about being willing to start again.
... a complex novel of great imagination, outside of time but very much concerned with it ... lovely, weird prose ... Yuknavitch's writing style is recognizable to readers familiar with her lyricism, coined words, love of the downtrodden, and water as an emphatic theme. Thrust is many things: a speculative history of the United States, a recognition of forgotten classes, a fluid song about the power of love, a celebration of the power of language and storytelling. It is an intricate novel in its interconnections, plotlines twisting away and back together again, but readers' attention will be well rewarded by profound, thought-provoking and deeply beautiful observations about humanity in an ever-changing world.
The blistering and visionary latest from Yuknavitch follows a time-traveling girl on the run with her father in a bleak near future...Laisvė , an enchanted and motherless girl, keeps company with worms and whales as she flees with her single father from 'Raids' perpetrated by ICE-like squads, 'armed men in vans snaking like killer whales through the streets' of The Brook, a city suffused by water and comprising much of what appears to be Brooklyn and lower Manhattan...But Laisvė has a gift; she is a 'carrier,' able to move through time with the aid of a talking box turtle and reach fellow outsiders hailing from various points in history, arriving to help unroot them from the nightmares of their time...'Stories are quantum,' as Laisvė narrates, and Yuknavitch preserves the courage and eccentricity of her subjects by subverting any impulse toward rote orthodox storytelling...Instead, she offers a cracked mirror, an untethered dream, and a catch-all for myriad strands of history through which the reader may pleasurably roam free...This is the author’s best yet.
One evening, when a Raid team comes knocking, Laisvė must put a tightly planned escape plan into action...But rather than head to a safe house, as she and her father had agreed, Laisvė has a secret...She’s seen her mother underwater, and she’s received instructions to travel to the past through the water, seeking out specific people...For what purpose, Laisvė is not told, but she sets off on a journey that will take her from a disabled sex worker in Victorian-era New York to a teen boy in a detention center with ties to Timothy McVeigh, and from the laborers who built the Statue of Liberty to the daughter of a European war criminal...Yuknavitch, as ever, is a maximalist, but the book wisely uses Laisvė (whose name means freedom in Lithuanian) as a kind of conduit through which many other narratives flow...Ultimately, Yuknavitch is interested in the way the bodies of immigrants, refugees, and marginalized people have been the fodder used to keep the American project going—and her humane love for those same bodies shines out everywhere through the extravagant prose...Complex, ambitious, and unafraid to earnestly love—and critique—America and its most dearly held principles.
