Pause for a moment and furrow your brow. Take a glance in the mirror. Notice how this wrinkling was created by two lines, perhaps similar in appearance but certainly not identical. And yet, when the two brows converge, they ultimately reach the same destination: the dead center of your forehead. To furrow is to fold two paths into each other until they are one; in other words, to furrow is to accept fate. This is precisely the premise of Namwali Serpell’s provocative second novel.
The Furrows largely follows C, a young biracial girl in Baltimore who witnesses the death of her younger brother, Wayne, when she is 12 years old. A seemingly simple premise, Serpell’s expert use of repetition makes the plot feel dynamic and unpredictable, even as she’s retelling the same basic story. Here is how the story goes: Wayne dies — sometimes via drowning, sometimes a fall or getting hit by a car — and C is the only one to witness it. There is a mysterious white man nearby who helps C in the aftermath of Wayne’s death, no matter how he dies. C’s father grows distant, eventually starting a new family, while C’s mother becomes convinced her son is still alive. A decade or so later, C will run into Wayne on the street, but just as the two meet, the story ends abruptly, and Serpell is on to the next retelling.
The sort of grief Serpell depicts is complicated and unruly, which makes it feel tangibly real. In her 1969 text, On Death and Dying, Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross coined the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Originally meant to depict the emotional trajectory of those diagnosed with a terminal illness, the concept is more colloquially used to give language to those who lose a loved one. This way of thinking about mourning — as a sensation that can be tracked and controlled, as an emotion with an expiration date — has not only been sociologically disproven but is also markedly white. In her latest novel Serpell joins the ranks of adrienne maree brown, Jesmyn Ward, Rivers Solomon, and other non-white authors who complicate grief’s timeline by not forcing it to coalesce into a linear model of healing. In an interview with NPR, the Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong spoke to these themes as they came up in his recent poetry collection, Time Is a Mother, which largely dealt with his mother’s death. “Grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love,” Vuong said. “This is the last act of loving someone. You get to do this, to translate this last act of love for the rest of your life.” This translation is the furrow wherein grief and love converge.
The sort of time loop Serpell employs in the novel is certainly not new. Notably, Natasha Lyonne’s 2019 Netflix series, Russian Doll, in which Lyonne is forced to relive the night of her 36th-birthday party over and over again after dying midway through, utilizes this structure expertly. In the 2020 Hulu movie Palm Springs, the protagonist, played by Cristin Milioti, similarly is forced to relive her sister’s wedding party. The time loop has also been having a moment in contemporary fiction, as seen in Kate Atkinson’s 2013 novel, Life After Life; Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018); and Before I Go to Sleep (2008) by S. J. Watson. Where most of these time loops allow their characters a chance to be reborn (or at the very least provide a new lease on life), Serpell is less concerned with resurrecting her dead characters as she is with looking after the ones who survive. The time loop functions not as a second chance to gain, but another opportunity to process what was lost.
The Furrows is, overall, a triumph. Serpell’s deft prose and languid narration come through beautifully throughout the novel. Every once in a while, a passage is so visceral it leaves the reader breathless, such as when C compares her brother drowning in the ocean to existing in the liminal space between life and death:
You felt the sky darken above you, a shadow passing, and when you came up to breathe, you were suddenly inside them, the great grooves in the water, the furrows. On either side of you, those whirring sheets of water, the foam along their edges sharpening like teeth. On either side of you, the furrows chewing, cleaving deeper. They ate you up. You were alone out there and the world took you back in, reclaimed you into its endless folding.
The mourning Serpell depicts is as deep and unpredictable as the sea. The pacing of the narrative — the tragedy of the death, the slow acceptance of loss, the surprising reunion, and then the rupture — mirrors the waves of grief rather than the linear path it is often made out to be. C’s continual grappling with her brother’s death is a powerful meditation on survivor’s guilt: “What if I had done X, what if Y hadn’t happened, would they still be alive?” But Serpell’s insistent, cyclical storytelling effectively negates these hypotheticals. Though C’s life looks different in every iteration of the story, Wayne’s death is the one thing that stays the same.
True to its title, The Furrows is broken into two parts. The novel’s second half is narrated by a man we know as Will, though we learn later that his real name is Wayne. Will is convinced he knows Wayne (C’s brother) from his childhood, and goes on a quest to find him, believing he has disappeared rather than died. He is tormented by Wayne’s memory, and most likely intends to harm Wayne if he finds him. He manipulates C, accompanies her to her family home, and even begins a sexual relationship with her, all to learn more about the family and potentially find Wayne.
While the double narration makes sense for the novel thematically, it often confuses the plot in the latter half of the book. Where Serpell expertly portrays a young grieving girl in the earlier section, her depiction of the male psyche is not as believable and at times feels silly, like an exaggerated machismo. Too, the parallels she draws between Will and Wayne often feel vague or incomplete. At times, Serpell insinuates that maybe Will was Wayne in another timeline (when the two first lock eyes: “A light twists between us, a gyred light, and I know. It’s him. It’s Wayne. This is our reunion”), while at other points Will seems to be a different man altogether (a few moments later: “The feel of his hand, dry and muscular, reminds me that I don’t even know his name. It would be absurd to ask now”). Though either plot could have driven the book compellingly, the narrative ambivalence ultimately feels unsatisfying. It’s possible that this dizzying noncommitment to character is precisely the point: Grief is nonsensical, as often are the connections made in its aftermath. “I don’t want to tell you what happened,” C insists at the book’s onset and several times thereafter. “I want to tell you how it felt.”
The concept of parallel universes pervades the novel, as two seemingly disparate ideas push up against each other in mostly failed attempts to coalesce: C’s white mother trusts the police to solve her son’s disappearance, whereas her Black father sets out to get revenge for Wayne’s death himself; there is a universe in which Wayne is dead and another where he’s simply disappeared; there is also a universe in which C believes Will is her brother, while another in which she feels he’s another man altogether. Toward the end of the novel, the very line between life and death itself becomes blurry. “Sometimes when I’m driving, I think, Did I just die?” C asks plainly. “I’ll change lanes without checking my blind spot and it’s like what if I just … skipped the collision part? What if I died back there but immediately moved into a parallel existence, in the next lane, without even knowing it?”
No matter how many times Wayne dies, there is one constant: There’s never a body. This absence forces the characters to find closure for themselves rather than, say, through more the more traditional means of an open-casket funeral. At the end of Part II, C’s mother, who in Part I believes so strongly that her son is alive that she founds an organization dedicated to rescuing him, admits that Wayne is dead. It’s a pivotal moment in the novel, effectively killing off the other timeline where Wayne has gone missing. That Wayne dies twice, in both of the novel’s timelines, furthers Serpell’s thesis of death as inevitability, the unchanging endpoint where two life paths converge.
Death as inevitability is a provoking thesis, one that furrows into itself: Serpell’s cyclical plot of enduring death can either leave readers feeling helpless or hopeful. If grief is, as Serpell suggests, the expansive wave between another’s death and our own, perhaps it is a fortuitous privilege to know what’s waiting for us on the shore.
