North Carolina author's debut novel shines in road-tripping 'Manmade Constellations'
It's said that all stories boil down to two basic plots: a person goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.
In her debut novel, "Manmade Constellations," North Carolina author Misha Lazzara manages to incorporate both.
The person in this case is Lois "Lo" Gunderson, a 20-something who desperately wants to get out of tiny Elysian, Minnesota. (Think Lake Wobegon without the charm.)
The locals gossip that Lo is a communist. In fact, she's a "freegan" who wants to be free of plastic waste and the consumerist society so she gets whatever she can at low or no cost from thrift stores and yard sales.
One day, she spots a classified ad in the local paper: Free car to a good home.
Lo heads to the address, a haunted-looking mansion stuffed with stacks of old newspapers. There, she meets Blanche, a feisty but frail old lady trailing a giant oxygen tank.
Yes, Blanche will give away her car. (It's outside, more or less buried under ice.) There's a catch, though. If she takes it, Lo has to swear to head west to California to find Blanche's son Jason. (He never calls and almost never writes, except for the occasional cryptic postcard.) Blanche is dying of emphysema, and she wants to see her son one last time.
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It takes Lo nearly 80 pages to get started. She hates Elysian, but she's a bit of a dawdler. (Her "gap year" between high school and college stretched out to nearly a decade.) Also, of course, the car won't run.
Luckily, she runs into John Blank, a young auto mechanic who's just come to Elysian from his home in North Carolina. Soft-spoken and polite, John gets the car running in no time. Plus, he's not bad-looking. (If only he didn't drink sweet tea out of plastic bottles!)
Blanche convinces John to go along with Lo on the trip. He'll come in handy if something breaks down. John only asks that they detour by Albuquerque so he can meet an estranged sister he hasn't seen in years.
Little do they know that Jason, the son, is also off on a road trip. An outsider like Lo, Jason lives in a yurt and works on a string of organic farms. But now, his longtime girlfriend, who's just discovered she's pregnant, has quarreled with him and kicked him out. He has to find himself and figure out what's next.
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The tale takes many twists and turns and flashbacks. John reveals some of his darker past; Lo reveals that she wants to find her birth mother. (She was adopted, sort of. Long story.) One side plot backtracks to a snake-handling church in the North Carolina mountains.
A lot of symbolism lurks beneath the surface, and the name of Elysian should be a giveaway to those who know Greek mythology. A recurring motif involves fireflies, which Lo truly loves; she spends much of the trip reading a book about them.
Lazzara earned a master's degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and her master's in creative writing from N.C. State University. "Manmade Constellations" is a near-perfect example of the well-made academic novel these days. With its quirky but appealing characters, it will remind some readers of early Anne Tyler.
BOOK REVIEW
'MANMADE CONSTELLATIONS'
By Misha Lazzara
Blackstone Publishing, $26.99
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: NC author Misha Lazzara's debut novel 'Manmade Constellations' shines
