Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.
Tender, exquisitely funny and supremely strange ... Exhilarating ... Spellbinding ... Being with this book requires the same quiet stamina, and its reward is to witness a rapturous and rare kind of truth. Once I surrendered to it, this savage American novel consumed me, as much as I consumed it.
Lange’s style is complex and comedic, giving Us Fools an unusual feel — do I laugh, do I sigh, do I stick it out and try to comprehend what’s happening? ... Bernie’s detailed obsession with her own feelings creates a problem for the reader: Lange doesn’t try to develop any analysis of how Bernie’s parents came to be the way they are ... Lange is interested in how Bernie manages to put together her own life, and as you read, the story becomes more and more compelling ... The real pleasure of the book, once you get used to it, is the complexity of Lange’s narrative style, the way it replicates the moment-by-moment passage of time in Bernie’s life and portrays how she puts up with the difficulties of learning to understand and survive the hand she has been dealt. Funny, sad, angry, pleased, frightened, resigned — Bernie jumps from one to the other page after page and pulls the reader along with her. For a debut novel, it is quite remarkable.
