Sandra Newman: “We need to reclaim utopianism”
Sandra Newman’s latest novel, The Heavens, mashes present into past with mordant formal inventiveness and a propulsive narrative. Surprise has been crucial to Newman’s career: Her novels are disparate in mode and subgenre, united by prankish wit, communitarian generosity, and daring conceits that play out unpredictably.
The Heavens finds a young woman in New York at the turn of the millennium dreaming that she’s also a young woman in England in 1593, namely Amelia Bassano, long-reputed Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Kate, the young dreamer, suffers visions of a looming apocalypse and becomes convinced that her actions in time of the Tudors might help right the world of 2000. Each time she awakens in her present, though, life has gotten worse for everyone, and her friends and family worry she’s going mad. The Heavens‘s vigorous upending of time-travel narratives follows Newman’s 2014 novel, The Country of Ice Cream Star, a dystopian epic set in a future America where nobody lives much past their teen years.
Newman’s first two novels, (2002) and (2007) are cutting and cunning in a more realist mode, while her memoir (2010) digs into a past as jolting as anything in her fiction. Newman’s sharp wit also distinguishes her nonfiction works, which include 2012’s and 2008’s , co-written with Howard Mittelmark. She’s also fearless and funny
