★ 06/20/2022
Pulitzer Prize finalist Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen) returns with a powerful epic set on a Southern California ranch during WWII. Rocky Rhodes named the ranch Three Chairs, after Thoreau’s idea that three chairs are for “society”—or “company,” as Rocky puts it. A widowed scion of a wealthy family back east, he lives there with his daughter, Sunny, and his twin sister. Sunny has a twin brother, Stryker, who is presumed to have died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rocky has spent much of his fortune battling the Los Angeles Water Board, furious that the city has stolen all the local water. Things get worse when Schiff, a young lawyer from the Department of the Interior, is sent to the area to establish an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Morally outraged himself, Schiff befriends the Rhodes family and falls for Sunny, a self-taught cook who takes inspiration from notes left by her mother. Here, Wiggins’s wordplay is stellar, as when the properties of a souffle become metaphor for the emotions of those about to eat it: “Sunny folded one thing—the inflated egg whites—into the other, le fond—with the greatest care, aware of both their fragile properties.” The dialogue is full of grit, and Wiggins manages to capture a big swath of mid-century America by placing a blue-blooded family into a desert inland complete with adobe haciendas, desert blooms, and Hollywood movie sets, while throughout, the Rhodes hold out hope for Stryker’s survival. Wiggins’s masterpiece is one for the ages. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Aug.)
Written in such marvelous prose. This sprawling masterpiece is filled with multigenerational coming-of-age stories and dives into the California water wars, as well as the birth (and shameful disgrace) of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar.”—New York Times
“Legitimately great…. This is a big, bold book, generous of spirit and packed with prose that gleefully breaks the rules…. It speaks to the heart as well as the head, and conjures characters to whom you won’t want to say goodbye.”—USA Today
“Poignant… the novel’s resounding theme, ‘You can’t save what you don’t love,’ applies to people and landscapes alike.” —New Yorker
“This is a love story. Or rather, several love stories…. ‘You can’t save what you don’t love,’ reads the declarative sentence that opens the novel. It becomes the theme that ties together the disparate characters as they attempt to save the water, save the land, save their families and ultimately save themselves. And it describes the novel that mother and daughter have saved together.”—Los Angeles Times
“Properties of Thirst is sprawling, rich, deep, passionate, beautiful, and as big as one of its key protagonists, the six-foot-plus California rancher Rocky Rhodes, and the vast mountain ranges he loves.”—New York Journal of Books
“Wiggins’s wordplay is stellar… the dialogue is full of grit, and Wiggins manages to capture a big swath of mid-century America by placing a blue-blooded family into a desert inland complete with adobe haciendas, desert blooms, and Hollywood movie sets…Wiggins’s masterpiece is one for the ages.”—The Millions
“A sweeping, cinematic story of love and family set against the dramatic backdrop of World War II and the American West…. What makes the novel soar is the way Wiggins can evoke landscapes both interior and exterior, especially the expansive valley that has come to exemplify America’s best qualities—and its worst. This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.”—Kirkus *Starred Review*
"Wiggins manages to capture a big swath of mid-century America by placing a blue-blooded family into a desert inland complete with adobe haciendas, desert blooms, and Hollywood movie sets, while throughout, the Rhodes hold out hope for Stryker’s survival. Wiggins’s masterpiece is one for the ages."–Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review*
“[a] grand novel of principled and creative individuals caught in the vise of history… Loss, desire, moral dilemmas, reflection, and zesty dialogue with the do-good energy of Frank Capra films generate a WWII home front tale of profound and far-ranging inquiry and imagination, scintillating humor, intrepid romance, and conscience.”—Booklist *Starred Review*
“Masterful…. Readers won’t be able to look away. Wiggins’ characters are raw and honest… [her] writing, which can be fragmented or polished depending on the page, opens up microscopic universes and sprawling landscapes alike. It’s a joy to read.”—Bookpage *Starred Review*
“These ‘properties of thirst’ come vividly alive in Marianne Wiggins’ expansive, thoroughly engaging new novel of the same name. A story of family, responsibility, and the tug of heritage, it applauds decency and determination while weighing the roles of individuals in collective wrongs…. Wiggins’ writing is observant, thoughtful, and willing to wrestle. It’s also a joy.”—Christian Science Monitor
“A sweeping, affecting story about family, property, and the soul of America might sound ambitious, but it's carried off with seeming ease by Marianne Wiggins, the award-winning author of Evidence of Things Unseen. This new novel follows a 1940s California family whose closely guarded land gets an unexpected neighbor when an internment camp is set to be built nearby, and examines love, loss, and what it truly means to be at home.”—Town & Country
"A rich historical fiction centered on a Southern California ranch family circa WWII and shot through with shades of Chinatown." –Entertainment Weekly
"This magnificent novel opens every little nerve of language and sends jolts of electricity along the spine. It's a love story, and a family tale, and a song of history. It's about shame and loss and recovery and beauty. It's a novel to cherish, composed with great humanity and humour."–Colum McCann
“A changing American landscape is beautifully portrayed in PROPERTIES OF THIRST, a moving and gripping new novel by Marianne Wiggins. At the start of World War II, while Japanese families are relocated to Manzanar, the Rhodes family, who live on a ranch near the camp are equally uprooted by memories and circumstances. What follows is a rich and powerful portrayal of love, loss, and the enduring strength of family. A novel to be read and savored.”—Gail Tsukiyama, bestselling author of Women of the Silk and The Samurai’s Garden
"This is a novel I wish I could have written. Keen, unsparing, and compassionate, Properties of Thirst reveals a world and a history I thought I knew, in language so beautiful, it took my breath away. Vividly alive, these characters mirror our present moment, our complex ties to this land and to each other, our most profound alienations and our fiercest loves."–Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being
"'Properties of Thirst' is a graceful and arresting meditation on the dark nature of greed and desire in the face of dwindling natural resources and pernicious xenophobia. It is impossible to read this novel and ignore the fact that the unscrupulous choices we've made in the past are the ones we're still making, ones that, if we're not able to look at ourselves with the moral clarity Wiggins brings to her fiction, we will continue to make."–Marisa Silver, author of The Mysteries, and Mary Coin
★ 07/01/2022
Vibrant characters, multiple storylines, and a visceral sense of time and place coalesce in this engrossing novel from Pulitzer finalist Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen). In the early 20th century, Rockwell Rhodes, heir to his father's railroad fortune, travels west to settle in the thriving agricultural community of California's Owens Valley. He builds a home for his wife, Lou, and their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and embraces the Indigenous and Mexican of the region's other inhabitants. But the Rhodeses' idyll is short-lived as Rocky battles the Los Angeles Water Authority, which has been desiccating the farmland by diverting the valley's water; Lou falls ill; and Rocky's sister Cas abandons her musical career to care for her niece and nephew. News of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor arrives the same day as Stryker's letter from Honolulu announcing a surprise marriage and the birth of twin sons. Tensions ratchet up further when Mr. Schiff, a lawyer from the U.S. Interior Department who is ambivalent about his remit in light of his Jewish roots, seeks help from the Rhodes family to enact Roosevelt's controversial order establishing the Manzanar concentration camp that would imprison thousands of Japanese Americans. VERDICT In lush language, Wiggins evokes a keen sense of history and its life altering effects, a righteous frustration with government deception, and faith in the power of love to quench one's deepest thirsts.—Sally Bissell
The consistent, fluid, and engrossing nature of this majestic novel is rendered even more remarkable by the fact that it was completed after the author suffered a massive stroke in 2016. Set in California during WWII, when Japanese-Americans were being interned by the U.S. Government, this ambitious saga of family, romance, and grief is poignantly narrated by Gabra Zackman and Stephen Graybill. The story is told by varying members of the wealthy Rhodes family—father Rocky; his sister, Caswell; and his daughter, Sunny—as well as Schiff, a Jewish-American lawyer who is overseeing the internment camp next to the Rhodes’s family ranch. While there are frequent switches between narrators, they are eased by the narrative skill of Zackman and Graybill. M.J. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
The consistent, fluid, and engrossing nature of this majestic novel is rendered even more remarkable by the fact that it was completed after the author suffered a massive stroke in 2016. Set in California during WWII, when Japanese-Americans were being interned by the U.S. Government, this ambitious saga of family, romance, and grief is poignantly narrated by Gabra Zackman and Stephen Graybill. The story is told by varying members of the wealthy Rhodes family—father Rocky; his sister, Caswell; and his daughter, Sunny—as well as Schiff, a Jewish-American lawyer who is overseeing the internment camp next to the Rhodes’s family ranch. While there are frequent switches between narrators, they are eased by the narrative skill of Zackman and Graybill. M.J. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-06-22
A sweeping, cinematic story of love and family set against the dramatic backdrop of World War II and the American West.
“You can’t save what you don’t love.” That’s the first sentence of Wiggins' new novel and a leitmotif throughout the book—a love story, in the classic sense, as well as a love letter to an American West celebrated by Hollywood even as it was sucked dry by the city of Los Angeles. It's also a lesson in how Wiggins’ languid, linguistically lush and lyrical novel, set in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, found its way to completion. As the author’s daughter, photographer Lara Porzak, relays in an afterword, Wiggins was just a few chapters shy of completing the book when, in 2016, she suffered a massive stroke that affected her sequencing logic and short-term memory. Porzak worked from Wiggins’ notes and with a collaborator to help her mother complete the novel, saving it as a true labor of love. Given that painstaking process and the breathtaking beauty of the bulk of this novel, it would be ungrateful to gripe that the end doesn’t quite live up to the standard set by the previous chapters. To be sure, Wiggins set an extremely high bar. The book follows the experiences of several memorable characters, including Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes, the scion of a wealthy East Coast railroad magnate, who has reinvented himself as a hardworking ranch man and impassioned preservationist; a Chicago-raised Jewish attorney named Schiff, who has been sent by the Department of the Interior to set up an internment camp for Japanese Americans in a desiccated former apple orchard adjacent to Rocky’s turf in Lone Pine, California; and Sunny, Rocky’s spirited daughter, a fiercely talented, mostly self-taught chef with whom Schiff falls in love. Wiggins’ interwoven plotlines—propelled here by romantic and there by familial love—and colorful characters are entrancing and as cinematic as the real-life Westerns that were filmed in the valley in which the book is primarily set. But what makes the novel soar is the way Wiggins can evoke landscapes both interior and exterior, especially the expansive valley that has come to exemplify America’s best qualities—and its worst.
This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.
