Wayward, Dana Spiotta

Wayward by Dana Spiotta

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After making an offer on a deteriorating architectural gem of a house in a run-down neighborhood of Syracuse, Sam Raymond realizes that she is leaving her husband, their comfortable suburban life – and almost incidentally, her 16-year-old daughter, Ally. Gradually the backstory emerges, of a husband and daughter to whom Sam feels invisible, or at least beside the point. Of a woman who loves history and works several days a week at the 19th century Clara Loomis House – a job she enjoys, but is surely not enough to live on. Of a perimenopausal woman subject to flashes of heat and emotion, who is seeking her place in the world, an identify of her own. But there is something driven about the way Sam embraces a narrow (but expensive!) mattress in a barely-heated old house, begins to train her body to run and lift weights, and surfs the rabbit-hole of social media and Syracuse society for feminist, edgy groups of women with whom she might identify. Everywhere she turns, she encounters hypocrisy and faux-engagement – and the well-coiffed, aging women with whom she feels little in common, whose bodies she harshly describes. Wanting to overcome her perceived weakness, to feel powerful, Sam instead runs up against a wall – of her daughter’s distance, her mother’s unwillingness to share her cancer diagnosis, of her own awkward attempts to reveal her needs and perceptions to the larger world. After witnessing the shooting of a black teenager, she is suddenly at the center of something real. But, apologetic and uncomfortable with her own privilege, she feels insufficient for this role, too.

In tandem with Sam’s quest, we hear Ally’s story and watch her come of age in a seedy relationship with an older man who is her mentor. More centered than her mother, Ally also seeks to push across her boundaries, but seems little unsettled by the experience. Sam’s mother Lily comes across as another strong woman, yet keeps her daughter at arm’s length. Finally, there is the story of Clara Loomis, a 19th century advocate of free love who runs off to the utopian Oneida Community as a teenager – another transgressor whose story in some sense parallels Ally’s and Sam’s. Some of the most enjoyable aspects of this novel are the settings in Syracuse, the careful descriptions of architecture, and the forays into history focused on the fictional Clara Loomis House. I found the novel at times funny, at times riveting, at times unsympathetic. Sam seems stuck in the rut of her own anger and self-doubt. The end of the story unexpectedly pulls the three women into a mystical generational union, beyond aging and death – yet there are few hints of such comfort earlier.




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