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CJ Hauser

Family of Origin: A Novel Kindle Edition

by CJ Hauser (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.9 135 ratings

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A novel by the author of the viral essay sensation "The Crane Wife": When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged older half-sister, to help.

This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station off the Gulf Coast, where a group called the Reversalists obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse.

On an island that is always looking backward, it's impossible for the siblings to ignore their past, and years of family secrecy threaten to ruin them all over again. Yet, despite themselves, the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, all the while grappling with questions of nature and nurture, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.

Print length

284 pages
Language

English
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Anchor
Publication date

July 16, 2019
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2079 KB
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

"CJ Hauser's Family of Origin is strange in that way raw honesty often is. It is sharp in its prose and in how it can so cleanly make you feel pierced through. Hauser lures us to an island and from there we learn of family and loss and the nature of our essential humanity. Funny and unforgettable."
—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black

“A bold, strange novel, one that spirits readers to some of the furthest reaches of human experience. Wildly inventive and intensely moving.”
—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“Family of Origin is a meditation on a singularly unique family that opens up to embrace all of us, every single family, every human being, and it doesn't let go. It's amazing…a supremely weird novel that displays humor and heartbreak in equal measure.”
—Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“In Family of Origin, CJ Hauser explores and explodes the most complex moments in life: those moments with a power that spirals both backward and forward in time, those moments that shift in meaning and shape us into who we are. This riveting and emotionally intricate book doesn’t shy away from the deepest questions about how a family, and a species, can survive.”
—Helen Phillips, author of The Need and The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“Family of Origin is a novel full of wonders: a heartfelt, hilarious book about the possible end of a family, and the world, and how an obscure duck on an obscure island populated by obscure scientists might just save us all. There is some serious magic in these pages. All hail CJ Hauser, who has made us a funny, tender, and hopeful book, just when we need it the most.”
—Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

“CJ Hauser's Family of Origin is unexpected and beautiful and utterly propulsive. Set in a world where colonizing Mars is a possibility, where a group of scientists and misfits believe that evolution is running in reverse, where love is strange and changeable and astonishing, Family of Origin reveals a new, spectacular universe. I've never read anything quite like it.”
—Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

“Shimmering yet precise…Family of Origin may be the most oddly enticing novel you will read this year...Keenly satirical yet unashamedly tender.”
—Wall Street Journal

“CJ Hauser's oddball-brilliant second novel [is] a spirited defense of the maligned millennial generation. It's also an innovative work of climate fiction, a nuanced and empathic family story, and, for my money, the summer's best novel thus far.”
—NPR.org

“Reminiscent of the family explorations of Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff, this tragicomic novel explores climate change, family ties, and the millennial generation’s feeling that they have arrived late to the party, that humanity and the environment appear to be declining before their eyes. Full of brilliantly realized characters, Hauser’s latest is profound, often incredibly funny, and captures the times like few other contemporary novels.”
—Booklist (starred)

“A strange and heartbreaking novel…Hauser's ability to render the complexities of family relationships with radical honesty is a feat…A lesser writer would not be able to deliver the disturbing and weird with the grace that Hauser does. A unique, poignant, and slightly taboo novel about family, biology, and evolution.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Hauser impresses with her wistful contemporary tale of family bonds and misplaced pessimism…This shimmering take on grief and family will enthrall fans of character-driven stories with its bevy of dashed dreams and cluttered emotions.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[S]harply and mysteriously illuminating…Hauser is a sharp and often witty observer of human behavior. She brilliantly portrays some of the central issues of contemporary life, particularly issues for the lives of millennials. And she raises provocative questions about how contemporary human beings will survive and make full lives for themselves in the future.”
—BookPage

About the Author

CJ Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novel The From-Aways and her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, and The Kenyon Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She lives in Hamilton, New York. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Landing

People came to Watch Landing to forget things. They gave themselves over to its Gulf Coast fug, its boardwalk amble, its funnel-cake smell, its open-carry vodka, its fireworks every night in order to forget, because they were on vacation.

This was the summer people came to the Landing to forget their jobs, forget climate change, forget police brutality, forget opioids, forget refugees, forget their inboxes, forget white supremacists, forget tsunamis out of season, and forget forget forget anyone who took it upon themselves to remind them of these things.

The Greys did not belong here.

Elsa and Nolan Grey might have been happier if they could be forgetful, or dead, but they were not. The Greys remembered everything.

They were fondlers of old grudges and conjurers of childhood Band-Aid smells. They were rescripters of ancient fights and relitigators of the past. They were scab-pickers and dead-horse-beaters and wallowers of the first order.

The Greys had not seen each other in almost three years, but they would converge at Watch Landing because their father was dead, drowned off the coast of Leap’s Island, an hour’s boat ride south, and as much as they would like to forget Dr. Ian Grey, they could not.

The first sign the Greys did not belong here was that, on the bus bound for Watch Landing, Elsa was the only one not dressed for the beach.

Two girls in front of her, smelling of coconut oil, wore bikini bottoms and t-shirts and hugged collapsible beach chairs. Elsa wore green pants turned up at the cuffs and Teva sandals. Her legs itched hotly. A giant backpack rode in the seat next to her and Elsa looped her arm around it like a conspirator. The bus turned onto the bridge to the peninsula. Once she got to the Landing, there was still the matter of finding someone with a boat to take them to Leap’s. Nolan, Elsa’s brother, who was meeting her there, claimed this would not be difficult, but it didn’t seem likely the island got many visitors, because the people who lived there were all crazy.

Elsa and Nolan’s father, Dr. Ian Grey, had moved to Leap’s after being humiliated at nearly every distinguished biology department on the West Coast and then losing a fellowship in Alabama. Ian’s fall from grace had been going on for so long that his children thought he might never stop falling. But he had, two years ago, when he’d joined the Reversalist movement and gone to live on Leap’s Island for good.

Leap’s was owned by Mitchell Townes and was inhabited by seven former scientists, researchers, and naturalists whom Townes had convinced of his theories and brought to live there, free of charge. The scientists’ work was dedicated to the world’s smallest known sea duck, the undowny bufflehead, and the island was the species’ only known nesting ground. The undowny bufflehead’s existence comprised the sum total evidence of the Reversalists’ core belief: that evolution had begun to run backward.

Elsa had learned all this on the Reversalists’ vague though well-maintained webpage. According to a counter at the bottom of the site, she was not alone. More than ten thousand people had been
interested enough in the Reversalists’ theories to scroll through their manifesto. Elsa puzzled over the Reversalists’ logo: the silhouette of a bearded man with a walking stick, his foot extended behind him, as if taking a step back. A caption referred to the logo as the “Darwin Walking Backward.”

It seemed unlikely to Elsa that her father had believed in any of this.

And yet, by the time Ian Grey had drowned, his rumpled clothes found among pouches of seaweed in one of the island coves the past week, her father had been living with the Reversalists for almost two years, which implied that, despite thirty years at Stanford, Cal Poly, and Berkeley, Ian did believe that human progress had slowed and swung on its fulcrum. He believed that evolution had reversed its course. And he believed all this because of some fucking ducks.

The bus slowed to its final stop at the Landing and everyone got off.

The pavement was cracked. The beach-going people scattered to the ramps over the dunes, to the liquor stores, to the snack shacks and t-shirt shops, and Elsa followed them.

She was a woman whose sweat smelled of iron, and already Elsa was sweating.

She hitched her thumbs in her pack straps. Her sandy hair was roped and piled on her head, and she wore a white tank top that did not cover her soft, curved midriff. Elsa’s mother, Ingrid, was a milk-pale Scandinavian nurse with very few bad moods. Elsa had inherited her paleness and little else.

There were many bars, because Watch Landing was the kind of boardwalk where people came to get drunk and stare at the ocean. No one was swimming. There were shrimp shacks and burger joints and a more formal restaurant with a long deck full of tables with white cloths, and of course this was where Elsa found Nolan.

There was a knot between Elsa’s shoulders that twisted taut when she saw him. Nolan’s mother, Keiko, a microbiome researcher from Kyoto, had been beautiful, and Nolan’s sleek hair and open, inquisitive face were his mother’s. The rest was all Grey.

Nolan’s hair was to his shoulders, and he’d pushed it back with a pair of sunglasses. His long legs were jacked out from the low deck chair, and he leaned over the table as he sucked from the head cavity of a crawfish. A glass of pale beer on the table was only a quarter drunk, beaded around the rim. He wore a blue oxford, open at the neck, and linen pants. In front of him was a bowl of carcasses. He looked so much like their father that Elsa paused. She’d not seen Ian since he moved to Leap’s, and Nolan on the boardwalk approximated a reincarnation.

This is mourning? Elsa called.

Nolan looked up. He stood respectfully, like a subordinate officer. His eyes were reddish and the bridge of his nose was dented from the glasses. She wanted to grab his elegant Adam’s-appled throat and squeeze. Weakness in Nolan had always driven her mad. Ever since he was small and needily sucking up all of Ian’s time.

Elsa drew close. Nolan’s fingers in the four o’clock light were oily and spotted with red; he held them out as she embraced him, so as not to stain her clothes. He kissed her cheek, and was it possible she felt the sting of cayenne?

We’re not mourning yet, are we? Nolan asked, as if he really wanted to know. As if he would not believe their father was dead unless Elsa said it was so. This pleased Elsa, and yet, why should it be up to her? They were thirty-five and twenty-nine years old, too old for this. Elsa’s life was a litany of troubles caused by the various absences of Ian Grey. Why should death be any different? Probably, the ghost of Ian Grey was off plunging his big-knuckled fingers into the layers of a duck’s eiderdown and squinting at whatever inscrutable thing he found there—oblivious that his disappearance had inconvenienced anyone at all.

Even this, even death, Ian would not make simple.

No mourning yet, Elsa told Nolan. She set her pack down as the waiter appeared and convinced her that a sweet, red slurry called a zombie was just the thing for a day like today. Elsa agreed. She ordered fried oysters and two sides of fries, because otherwise, she knew, Nolan would eat most of hers and she’d have to be angry at him, because she was hungry and wanted to eat them all without sharing, and there was no time for them to be angry with each other now. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07JL433TN
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (July 16, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 16, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2079 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 284 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0385544626

Best Sellers Rank: #533,152 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #235 in Absurdist Fiction (Books)
- #427 in Sibling Fiction
- #680 in Humorous Literary Fiction

Customer Reviews:
3.9 135 ratings

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CJ Hauser

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CJ Hauser (she/they) teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University.

Their first full length work of nonfiction, The Crane Wife: a memoir-in-essays was recently released from Doubleday in the US and Viking in the UK.

Their novel, Family of Origin, was published by Doubleday in 2019, and their novel, The From-Aways, was published by William Morrow in 2014.

Their work has also appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Guardian, Bon Appetit, Elle Magazine UK, Vogue UK and The New York Times. They hold an MFA from Brooklyn College and a PhD from Florida State University.

www.cjhauser.com

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5

135 global ratings

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mountain mama

Engaging and unusual read

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2019

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The family dynamics in this book are unusual. The writing is clear, descriptive and kept my attention. I like books with a twist and this one has a few! Fortunately the ending is satisfying.

8 people found this helpful

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Shan S Wevill

Meh

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2022

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I enjoyed the initial descriptions and found the characters intriguing….at first. Then I got tired of them and kept hoping that the end of each chapter was the end. So, not for me.

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2019

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I really liked all the sciencey stuff but it was a lil weird. Overall a good read and a good book tho

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Kate Gaskin

Tender and compelling

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2019

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Family of Origin is a clever and a compelling read with out of this world characterization and more than enough plot to keep readers engaged. I loved spending time with this family and discovering all of their secrets. Hauser's writing is lush and atmospheric and at times very funny and tender. This is a beautiful book.

5 people found this helpful

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colleen dunn

Loved the plot, hated the characters

Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2019

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The story was extremely interesting. The characters unfortunately were completely unlikable. Would have liked more science and less weird brother-sister-ish romantic drama

5 people found this helpful

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P. Jackson

good read

Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2019

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a lot of quirky characters and some surprises, worth the read