Mid-Air
Victoria Shorr’s remarkable gift for depicting the inner lives of complex characters shines in two powerful explorations of family, ambition, class, and status.
Mid-Air” is yet another inventive excavation of the past, this one in the form of two novellas whose themes are family and class, one an account of patrician decline and the other a tale of rags to riches. Each is a minor masterpiece, and both gain resonance in juxtaposition with each other. Together they form a witty and moving portrait of American life going back a half-century or more....Ms. Shorr excels at capturing the arc of a relationship as well as of a life....Above all, both these fine novellas unfurl the kind of complicated family tapestries that every generation ends up weaving from money and love.
— Wall Street Journal
In their section on Historical Fiction, Alida Becker praises Shorr's “eye for telling detail as she unreels the families’ varied experiences. And then there’s her insightful acknowledgment that those experiences are transformed as they sink in to the past, that their subtle shadings will inevitably be lost.”
— New York Times
Intergenerational jarring rules both “Great Uncle Edward,” the more genteel and sallow of the fine fictions Shorr presents here, and “Cleveland Auto Wrecking,” its more-developed, slightly sunnier sequel. The first examines a moneyed family on its way down, the second an immigrant clan on entrepreneurial ascent. Both are beautifully written, their characters almost too full-bodied for the demanding, disciplined novella form.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Shorr proves herself a literary mimic of the first order with these two pitch-perfect stories. . . . The author cleverly juxtaposes how one aspect of American society falls as another rises, and both novellas have a novellike density of detail and depth of characterization. Together, they offer rich rewards.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“In style and substance, Shorr summons the works of Anne Tyler as she rejoices in her characters’ day-to-day experiences, dropping pearls of insight into crystalline vignettes. Her characters are more recognizable than remote, their struggles more mundane than mighty, evoking sympathy while challenging assumptions. The novella format can be a thorny one to embrace, either too short or too long. In Shorr’s hands, it is just right.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Shorr’s prose is fluid and supple. . . . [H]er insights are so keen, and her storytelling so
elegant and natural. . . . [T]his book is a quiet accomplishment.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Victoria Shorr is a conjurer of the highest order, artfully creating apposite tales of
family ruin and family success in her wry, insightful, and elegant prose.”
—Lily Tuck, author of Sisters
“The two novellas in Victoria Shorr’s book Mid-Air are intimate portraits of inclusion and exclusion,
as well as the dangers implicit in nostalgia. Rich with an acerbic skepticism and abetted by
the unexpected detail that renders something humorous, Shorr writes with a tolerance of
ambiguity that is provocative as well as enlightening.”
—Susanna Moore, author of Miss Aluminum
The promise of the American Dream animated the twentieth century. It called to successive waves of immigrants who remade elements of the United States in their own image, and it fueled prewar fears and postwar hopes. It glowed in the reflection of fortunes made and smoked in the ruins of fortunes lost. The story of the twentieth century is the narrative arc of social mobility, of leaps up and down the ladder, of a Roaring Twenties matched by a Great Depression.
In MID-AIR [W. W. Norton & Company; May 17, 2022; $26.95 Hardcover], a collection of two novellas, Victoria Shorr, the celebrated author of Backlands, The Plum Trees, and Midnight—which the New York Times Book Review called “as exciting as lived experience”—traces the rise of one family and the fall of another, a paired portrait of the social forces and personal conflicts that attend both success and failure.
The first novella, “Great Uncle Edward,” follows the titular character from his aristocratic origins—Harvard, class of “Aught Five”—to the last gasp of his family’s influence and wealth. It is 1978, and Great Uncle Edward’s grandniece by marriage is hosting a dinner party. She is the one who narrates the encounter, describing the declining fortunes of each guest: Betty, whose promising beginnings in life—childhood in a sprawling family home in New Jersey, training as a sculptor, a whirlwind marriage—yield to years of scraping by, deserted and divorced in a miniscule month-by-month flat on First Avenue; Molly, Betty’s alcoholic younger sister, who arrives at the party with “lank and greasy hair” and “ill-fitting, wrinkled clothes,” (32) straight from her job as an X-ray technician; and Russell, their cousin, who hawks family treasures from the back of an antique store, selling off the past to pay for the present.
The second novella, “Cleveland Auto Wrecking,” follows the good fortune of an immigrant family whose patriarch, Sam White, illiterate at age thirteen, makes his way to the American Midwest, where he establishes a successful scrap metal business, and retires to the paradise of Southern California. It is his three sons, however, who must come to terms with the pleasures and limits of that success: Roy, the eldest, whose restless pursuit of a “big shot” persona alienates him from his siblings; Mel, quiet and dutiful, whose wife, Rhonda, holds the family together; and B., the youngest, who pines for Roy’s girlfriend, simmering with resentment. When Roy leaves for the promise of wealth in the California desert, B. is finally able to make a life for himself, free of his brother’s shadow.
In MID-AIR, Victoria Shorr, whom National Book Award–winning novelist Lily Tuck has called “a conjurer of the highest order,” summons the ghosts of the past in two families, one on its way up in the world and the other on a long decline. Like the two masters alluded to in “Great Uncle Edward,” Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shorr choreographs an intricate and revelatory dance between characters, between past and present, memory and forgetfulness, fortune and misfortune.
Victoria Shorr on the Art of the Novella
”They take you—for one evening if you don't put it down, longer if you draw it out—to a place that you can see in sharp detail.”
Victoria Shorr is happy meet in person or virtually with interested book groups.
Please contact Kyle Radler at kradler@wwnorton.com