A Novel That Shows the Dark Side of Utopia

Straddling the border of Virginia and North Carolina, the Great Dismal Swamp stretches 750 square miles and teems with thick, tangled vines. Lofty pine trees shade the sun; pools of standing black water snake a path to an expansive freshwater lake. In the 16th century, when Europeans began to colonize North America’s coast, this marshy interior became a haven for outcasts. “Self-emancipators,” the historian J. Brent Morris writes in Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, “settled into new lives of freedom in a wilderness landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites.” In these maroon settlements, which bloomed throughout the Atlantic world, formerly enslaved people raised livestock, built homes out of self-harvested timber, tended gardens, and occasionally raided the farms and slave camps of their neighbors.

Gabriel Bump’s second novel, , is set roughly in the present day. Though about a century and a half has passed since slavery ended in the U.S.society, of course, remains troubled and unequal. Early in the book, Rio, an ambitious young Black woman who works as a professor, takes a solitary walk in the woods near her home in Western Massachusetts. She’s unmoored by the loss of her newborn child—as well as by a creeping sense of purposelessness in her marriage and bourgeois existence in general. Even before the child’s death, Rio had felt the walls closing in. She’d made her husband get them “the fuck out of Boston,” disconnected from social media, and mounted a giant world map on a wall in their new home to track contemporary calamities, marking each with a large red : wildfires, migrant shipwrecks, police killings.