Zorrie

By Laird Hunt

Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award (Fiction)
“A virtuosic portrait.” –New York Times Book Review
“A tender, glowing novel.” –Anthony Doerr, Guardian, “Best Books of the Year”
“Pages that are polished like jewels.” –Scott Simon, NPR, "Books We Love"
"Lit from within.” -Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times, “Best Fiction Books of the Year”
"A touching, tightly woven story from an always impressive author." -Kirkus (starred review), “Best Fiction of the Year”
“Radiates the heat of a beating heart.” –Vox
“A poignant, unforgettable novel.” –Hernan Diaz

From prize-winning, acclaimed author Laird Hunt, a poignant novel about a woman searching for her place in the world and finding it in the daily rhythms of life in rural Indiana.

“It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.”

As a girl, Zorrie Underwood's modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.

But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.

Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt's extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781635575378

Laird Hunt

Laird Hunt's most recent novel, Zorrie, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Hunt has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield­-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge Award. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

Book preview

I

out of this shadow, into this sun

Zorrie Underwood had been known throughout the county as a hard worker for more than fifty years, so it troubled her when finally the hoe started slipping from her hands, the paring knife from her fingers, the breath in shallow bursts from her lungs, and, smack dab in the middle of the day, she had to lie down. At first she carried out this previously unthinkable obligation on the worn leather of the daybed in the front room, with her jaw set, hands pressed tight against her sides, staring up at the end of a long crack that ran the length of the ceiling, or at the flecks of blue light thrown onto the legs of the dining room table by the stained-glass jay that hung in the south window. When after several minutes of this she felt her breath slowing and the blood flowing back out through her veins, she would ease herself up, shake her head, and resume whatever activity had been interrupted. Once, though, after she had slipped in the garden and landed in a tangle of rhubarb, she lay down on the daybed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep that wasn’t interrupted until, late in the evening, the cat began mewling and scratching at the side door. It took her a long time to come fully into consciousness, and as she lay there, vaguely urging her eyelids to open, aware that she was not quite awake, it seemed to her she had never felt so comfortable, so careless, so at ease. She set a feather pillow on the daybed and pulled a light wool blanket out of the upstairs closet. She began to intersperse her work in the garden and yard with regularly scheduled naps. She would lie on her side with her back to the room and look at the deep white of the wall. She would be unaware that her eyes had closed. She would sleep. Every now and again her conscience would chase her up off the daybed and back into her weedy rows or fruit-filled trees, but mostly during the time she had allotted, and sometimes past it, she just gazed at the wall or slept. One morning, well before it was time to lie down, she looked over at the pillow and blanket and soft leather and realized, with a shudder that seemed to chill and warm her both, that she was filled with longing.

She had never liked to dream. After diphtheria took first her mother and then her father, she was raised by an elderly aunt who told her that people were born dreaming of devils and dark roses and should beware. This aunt, whom her dying father had only called on reluctantly, for she had drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness after a badly failed marriage, shook and scolded Zorrie vigorously when, as happened frequently during the first months, she woke up crying. If she woke up screaming, she received a slap. Sometimes she received a slap anyway. Either because of what she was leaving behind in the dizzying hallways of her head or what she was waking to, Zorrie came to harbor what proved a lifelong distrust of the deep hours, as her aunt referred to them, when the mind played tricks on itself.

Days were different. Zorrie ran, she skipped, she won a prize at school for turning the best cartwheel. She and the other children played with hoops and balls in the yard. No one could climb a tree as quickly as she could, and there were only two boys in the school who could beat her at arm wrestling. The teacher, Mr. Thomas, would take them on long walks through the woods and across the fields. Often on these expeditions they were asked to collect interesting objects. Zorrie would run back and forth like a dog working a field, her quick hands flashing down to the ground and up again. Heart pounding, she would bring her discoveries to Mr. Thomas for inspection. He would lift each leaf or mushroom or insect close to his face or up to the light or under his magnifying glass and, with Zorrie leaning over his shoulder, or even holding the magnifying glass herself, murmur, Yes. Very interesting. This is a good specimen, Zorrie. Well done.

When it rained, Zorrie sat at her desk and, brow furrowed, labored over her slate while the other children played checkers and spun tops and jumped around the room. She liked the musty smell of the books and the feel of chalk residue on her fingers and couldn’t be convinced that the inside of the schoolhouse was meant for anything but learning. She loved the songs Mr. Thomas taught them and the stories he told about battles fought long ago. She didn’t learn to read as quickly as some of the others, but when she did, she rarely made a mistake. From the start, her mind moved quickly through figures and made light work of anything to do with geography. In fact, she knew the capitals of the forty-eight states and the names of all the South American countries before several of the older children and, after whispering the names of the major European cities to herself over and over again before she fell asleep each night, received the highest marks of the school on a year-end geography exam.

If Zorrie was at home, which is where she was to be found on school days after her fifteenth birthday, she helped with the goat or the garden or the chickens or the cooking or the sewing her aunt took in. Though her ruined marriage had left her at best ambivalent about the faith of her former husband, her aunt never set aside a Lutheran’s belief in the redemptive power of work, and something like a gleam, a little bit of breath on a little bit of near-burned-out coal, would enter the old woman’s eye whenever Zorrie would finish a job quickly and start another one. At moments like those, her habitually pinched lips might part and a few words emerge. Sometimes it was about a plan she had once had to open a flower shop in nearby Frankfort, a nice place with peonies or lilies in the window and a chair or two on which her tired customers might sit a moment on a hot day. She would talk too about a trip she had taken before her marriage, to Bedford or Bloomington, where she had spent hours in a fabric store running her hands over bolt after bolt of crinoline and serge and silk. Every once in a great while her aunt would sing softly in a voice that was thin but true, songs that tended in the main toward melancholy, like the one about a man who each day put on his suit, cut a single flower from his garden, and carried it five miles along a dusty railroad track to the house of the woman he loved. Sometimes in the song he did this until the woman agreed to marry him, and others he did it until one or the other of them had died.

As their shovels scraped or their needles flew, her aunt might, on exceptionally rare occasions, offer some comment about Zorrie’s parents. A blue dragonfly had once landed on her mother’s finger at a church supper and made her shriek. She had loved blackberries and angel food cake and had had an uncommonly loud laugh. Her father had been good at horseshoes, bad at plowing, and given more easily than was seemly to tears. Zorrie worked, on those days when her aunt’s lips parted and she spoke or sang, until her fingers ached and her eyes blurred in hopes that it might continue. She worked until it felt like there was a knife blade jabbing at the muscles around her neck. She worked until she had started making mistakes and then stopped, took a deep breath, and picked up where she had left off. Once, on one of those long days, when she had finished hemming a skirt and had reached for another, her aunt called her a good girl. Zorrie waited for years but never heard it again.

Her aunt died of a stroke three days after Zorrie’s twenty-first birthday and left her nothing—not even a key to the front door—so Zorrie went to Frankfort to find work. It was 1930, and there wasn’t any. She looked for a week and then walked back out into the countryside to try her luck in some of the smaller towns. One of the doors she knocked on in Jefferson turned out to belong to her old teacher, Mr. Thomas. He was balder and somewhat heavier but otherwise unchanged, and she was very happy to see him. His house was filled to the brim with books and pictures. Photographs were neatly arranged along the mantelpiece. There was a gold-framed painting of a man standing hat in hands and head-bowed in a churchyard, and a glass case of butterflies that Mr. Thomas said he’d collected over the years in fields and forests across the county. The breeze spilled in through big west-facing windows, bringing in with it the braided smells of mint, thyme, and honeysuckle. Mr. Thomas had Zorrie sit down at the kitchen table and put two fried egg sandwiches, pickled carrots, and a pitcher of iced tea in front of her. Zorrie said she liked to work for what she was offered and would be glad to help after the meal with any chore, large or small, Mr. Thomas might have on his hands, that she could sew, chop, and churn until the cows came home. As she ate and drank, as slowly as she could stand to, Mr. Thomas chewed on an unlit pipe and told her that she had been much missed in his classroom after she had left, that she had been liked and admired by her fellows and greatly appreciated by him. He spoke of her unswerving dedication to the task, no matter how tedious the lesson, and her resolute kindness to younger children who were struggling. He wondered if she had been told that he had attempted more than once, to no avail, to convince Zorrie’s aunt to let her return. She said she had not.

She was most impressive in her way, was your aunt, he said. I heard of course about her demise. Please accept my condolences. I expect it’s hard carrying on there at home without her.

Zorrie nodded and smiled. She did not like to lie even halfway to her old teacher about her circumstances, but felt too shy to worry him about where she was now sleeping, so changed the subject and asked what, now that she had eaten at his table, he had for her to help him with. After remarking that everything was under control, especially since the school year would soon be over and he could look to shoring up the home front, Mr. Thomas responded to her insistence by vanishing for several minutes and then coming back with a few pressed shirts that were missing buttons. He had a sewing kit she could use, and spares that matched the missing buttons so perfectly that it was clear to her that he had gone into his bedroom and carefully torn them off. Zorrie found it curious that in such quick succession first she and then he had jostled the truth for fear of incurring discomfort or upset. For a moment, as if the years had been set aside and they were back in his classroom, she had an urge to raise her hand and ask Mr. Thomas if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised, but instead she reached for the sewing kit and let the small smile that formed on her lips at the thought of raising her hand after all this time serve in place of what might have been an interesting answer.

While she worked, with the fine, clean fragrance of the shirts wafting up around her, Mr. Thomas chewed on his pipe and showed her an album of pressed leaves and flowers on one of the pages of which a pretty red maple leaf, rimmed emerald around its edges, sat between a purple chrysanthemum and a cluster of burnt-orange mycena above the neatly printed words Specimens Collected by Zorrie Callisher on October the 19th, 1923.

It was that day along Sugar Creek at the back of the Freeman farm. We had to go back early because of a storm, Zorrie said.

We had to double-time it, didn’t we?

And we still got soaked.

It took my shoes about a week to dry. I’m not sure they ever quite recovered.

Zorrie touched at the album page, ran her finger around the edge of the mycena. I didn’t know you kept these things.

I kept them all. Everything that could be pressed, anyway. I have more of these albums over at school.

Zorrie tapped gently at the maple stem. She had stopped to pick it up as the first fat drops of rain had begun to fall. She had not thought about that day in years but now remembered with pleasing clarity the sound of laughter and hollering as the rain started hitting them, the way their feet

Reviews for Zorrie

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book does what it sets out to. It is a charmingly polished bit of manipulative fiction. I can't love it, but I did feel it.

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful little novel about a humble helping small town woman.In this sense the author's theme is every person's life is important and is a meaningful story. For a time in her young life she works in a factory in Chicago where she paints numbers with radium (cancer causing) based paint on clock faces. She loves her garden and her husband until he is killed during World War Two. She carries on with courage and humanity and makes a meaningful life for herself after this. Mr. Hunt writes a beautiful nevel about a beautiful character.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Zorrie Underwood has lived a long life in Indiana, growing up with her aunt after her parents pass away, working on radium dials, falling in love, surviving world wars.This introspective, quiet tale beautifully illuminates a small but well-lived life of one woman in the midwestern United States through the 20th century. The writing is lovely but each piece needs the whole to stand together, so it wasn't one where I drew out a lot of beautiful quotes. I have a hard time reading this kind of book because I don't imagine things vividly and usually need more plot or dialogue to keep me going, but when I persevered it just "clicked" after awhile, and I enjoyed the not-always-peaceful ride of Zorrie's life and friends and neighbors.

[tangledthread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In a short 176 pages this book lays out the life of Zorrie, a woman who lived her life in Indiana during the middle of the 20th century. Orphaned at an early age, she is raised by her grass widow of an aunt whose bitterness is palpable. As Zorrie reaches her late teens during the depression, the aunt dies leaving Zorrie homeless. She wanders, visiting a former teacher whom she admired, hoping to find some employment. She ultimately ends up as a radium girl, painting luminescent watch faces in Illlinois, where she meets two young women who become her first meaningful friends.After a month, she heads back to her roots in Indiana because she is homesick. A retired farming couple take her in and she meets and marries their son, who has taken over the family farm. And the rest of the mid-century unfolds.This is largely the story of a strong woman whose strength is emotional as well as physical. But she is also a lonely woman and that loneliness seeps through every page. The writing is lovely prose and is very elegiac in nature.This book has been nominated for several awards. In some ways I can see the reason for that. At the same time, I wonder about the appeal of this bleak book set in what so many like to call "fly over" country. For many, it just might give them more reason to permanently relegate the midwest to that status.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of a life well-lived told in plain and simple prose. It reminded me to the Kent Haruf trilogy I've been reading this year, but rather than the high plains, a tale of the farming lives of Indiana, with a touch of radium girls thrown in.One anachronism really bothered me. Zorrie first noticed her neighbor Noah fretting over his wife Opal (who has been institutionalized) before WW II. Later in the book, in the late 1950's when Zorrie is hanging clothes with Noah's mother she is whistling "That'll Be the Day," a Buddy Holly song from the 50's--I remember it--and Noah's mom says that Opal used to hum that song while hanging clothes. However, Opal hadn't been around to hang clothes since at least before WW II. Seems like a big mistake, unless I'm misconstruing it.This is the eighth novel by a writer I'd never heard of. With the exception above, I liked this story of an ordinary life of hard work and simple pleasures.First line: "Zorrie Underwood had been known through-out the county as a hard worker for more than fifty years, so it troubled her when finally the hoe started slipping from her hands, the paring knife from her fingers, the breath in shallow bursts from her lungs, and smack dab in the middle of the day, she had to lie down."Last line: "But mostly she would just lie there, very still, turning it all over in her head."3 stars

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Laird Hunt's novel is an account of the life of a woman most would overlook. Zorrie is born and raised on an Indiana farm until her parents die when she is young and she is sent to live with an aunt who provides her with a place to stay and plenty of work, but little in the way of nurturing. When her aunt dies, Zorrie is a teenager left homeless and penniless in the middle of the Great Depression. But while Zorrie may have had to prove her resilience time and time again, this isn't a tragic tale because Zorrie is no one's tragic heroine. She's a tough and yet loving woman who loves the Indiana soil and the people in her life. I loved this quiet story about an ordinary and remarkable woman. Hunt writes about her with such love and understanding that she feels like a beloved older relative. Zorrie lived through a tumultuous time in history, working as a "radium girl" painting clock faces and dials with glowing paint, seeing her husband leave for the war and not return and to have a transformative experience of her own, late in life. I'm glad this book was shortlisted for the National Book Award and so brought to my notice. It's a worthwhile read.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a novel about one life, that of Zorrie--childhood, friendships, heartache, successes, bad times. At only 161 pages it (obviously) skips over decades of time, and it is unclear when it ends (1980s? 1990s?). It is a Nice Book and is not objectionable at all. It describes a fairly average woman's life in rural 20th century mid America. But I do not understand why this novel is getting so much attention. It's not spectacular in any way--it's just totally, 100%, fine.This is my first Laird Hunt novel, and it reminds my of both Jane Smiley and Anne Tyler.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a quiet novel about the life of protagonist Zorrie Underwood. Orphaned as a young girl, she was reared by an aunt. She makes a fateful journey to Ottawa, then returns to Indiana. It touches on significant events of the 20th century, such as the Great Depression and the two World Wars.

It portrays how an ordinary woman living in a remote community can live a multifaceted and meaningful life touched by dramatic events. The tone is melancholy. Zorrie is a wonderfully drawn character, and the writing is elegant. It says a great deal about one woman’s life in a book of under 200 pages. Pick this one up if you are in the mood for reflection.

“The body was a beautiful mechanism, and part of that beauty lay in its precariousness, its finitude. Mortality was a good thing, as it kept the earth and its wheel of wonders in true.”

[jjbooklvr · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How do you tell the tale of one woman's life in so few pages? And yet somehow the author does so in such a way to capture Zorrie's essence and see the world through her eyes. With writing that just begs you to slow down and savor every turn of phrase. Perfection. That is all I can say.

[flourgirl49 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book tells the story of Zorrie's life in just 160 pages. It was going along at a nice clip until about halfway through when it got bogged down in the Zorrie/Noah relationship for far too long. I would have to disagree with the thought that this story compares favorably with Kent Haruf's "Plainsong" books - Haruf's prose was far more luminous and engaging while Laird Hunt's was kind of boring. I found this book disappointing, since I thought Hunt's book "Neverhome" was really quite good. Read that one instead of this.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Zorrie was orphaned in childhood, and raised by an emotionally distant aunt. After the aunt dies and Zorrie has to make her way on her own, she finds work as a “radium girl” painting watch dials in an Illinois factory. Told the paint was harmless, the workers ingested large quantities of radium during the course of their work. While Zorrie has close friendships with her fellow workers, she is eventually drawn back to the northern Indiana farmland where she grew up. Years pass, with all the ups and downs expected of farming life and, indeed, of life in general. Zorrie’s common sense and work ethic serve her well on the farm, and her empathy and caring lead to close bonds with many in the community. The setting and overall tone of this short novel is reminiscent of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong trilogy. Zorrie’s life story is told in exquisite prose, with just as much meaning in what goes unsaid. At just 160 pages, this could be a quick read but I found myself periodically setting it aside to savor what I’d just read. I loved this book.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you love quiet introspection (and I do, I really do) then have I got a book for you. How this author, with whom I have no acquaintance, wrote such a beautiful book, depicting one woman's life from about the 1930s on, in under 200 pages is quite remarkable. But by the end of the book, I knew Zorrie like I'd known her all my life.Although she often led a life of disappointment, Zorrie was a bigger than life character. Her parents died when she was a young child and the aunt who took over her care was a bit of a wicked stepmother. When her aunt died and Zorrie was a teenager, she had to fend for herself as her aunt left her with nothing. Set in rural Indiana for the most part, Zorrie gets her first real job, working in the radium factory in Ottawa, Illinois where she bonds with two other women who become lifelong friends. But Zorrie wasn't one to stay in one place long. She eventually settles on a farm in Indiana and stays there for the rest of her life. Her years on the farm go a long way to developing her character. If that all sounds boring to you, well, this quiet little book may not be for you. For me it was bliss. And above all, a book about hope, and how we have to fight sometimes to hang onto it."Her aunt had disparaged the concept of hope with such caustic efficiency that Zorrie had naturally learned to discount what had ever been an important part of her nature. If she had done her best to seal up the spring during those early years....hope had nonetheless often found a way to seep out and surprise her, bow graciously, extend its hand, and ask her to dance." (Page 58)I will not soon forget you Zorrie Underwood.

[maryreinert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This isn't a book with a lot of plot, but it is a close look at the life of a "regular" woman living in the mid-west following the Depression. Zorrie becomes an orphan early in life and in then raised by her "hope-killing" aunt. When Zorrie grows after her aunt dies (and leaves her nothing), she takes off for Ohio and takes a job as a radium dial painter here meeting two friends, Janie and Marie. Feeling the call to go back home, she heads back to Indiana where she meets Harold who she weds. Harold eventually goes off to war and is killed leaving Zorrie a fairly young widow.Zorrie is really a victim but is definitely a survivor. At one point, she miscarries perhaps due to the radium exposure even though it is not known. Her friend Marie does die a terrible death and Janie later has cancer. This is a story of how environment affects people in such a subtle way and individual choices are blindly made and sometimes make no difference.Zorrie throughout her life is a hard worker (farming), a good and loyal friend, a wonderful daughter-in-law, a kind neighbor, and a solid individual with her own worries and cares and doubts. This is a good book that lets one look at an individual who was just considered "ordinary" by so many but was such a strong and loving person. Good read (Reminded me somewhat of the main character in "The Tie that Binds"

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This quiet novel reminded me so much of my grandparents’ farm in Nebraska. Nothing earthshaking takes place, life moves on from day to day, filled with joy, friendship, sadness and hard work. By placing an independent female as the protagonist Zorrie takes a different approach. Zorrie grew up with an aunt until the aunt’s death, and then Zorrie became one of the many people moving from place to place in the depression looking for work. An opportunity to live with an elderly couple and care for them led to her marriage to their son. Harold and Zorrie ran the family farm. Harold went off to fight in WWII and never returned. Zorrie remained farming alone with the help of hired hands. Zorrie became a memorial character and probably reflects the life of many women during the depression and many of them probably echo her loneliness with the death of a spouse during the war. The book is less than 200 pages and yet by the end, the reader is fully engaged in Zorrie’s mundane life.

[beamis12 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Laird Hunt is a master storyteller. In less than 200 page he gives us the life of a hard-working woman of the thirties. It is a simple story, simple only in that there are no big scenes, no car chases, because we know life, in fact, is never simple. Worries wants what we all want, security, a home, family, friends, love, and a way to make a living. It takes place in my own stomping grounds in Illinois and Indiana, places in which I'm very familiar.Her parents did when she is young and she is raised by a rather cold aunt. When Zorrie is 21, her aunt died and leaves her with nothing. It is now up to her to find her own way. She spends time working in Ottawa working with radium, painting the dials on watch faces. She doesn't stay long, but long enough to make two good friends and for the detriments of this work to have an effect , showing up later in her life. From there she eventually finds the place she will call home. This book is her story. The tone is a quiet melancholy one, the prose, the phrases, beautiful. Zorrie, herself draws the reader into her life. We care about what happens to her, her life is not easy, but in many ways it suits. She makes the best of what she has and if her life is not particularly joyful, it has its moments. It feels real, authentic, one can envision this life, there is no phoniness. I'll just say it left it's mark, since I woke up in the morning still thinking about this story.This was a read I shared with Esil and Angela, and the first in a long time where we all gave it five stars. I always feel fortunate when I share a reading journey with them.ARC from Edelweiss.