The premise of Dana Spiotta's new novel “Wayward” really drew me in as it concerns a woman named Samantha in her early 50s who impetuously decides to buy a small house. This plot reminded me of one of my favourite novels “Ladder of Years” by Anne Tyler. It also feels like a kind of wish fulfilment as I've occasionally spent time online dreamily looking at shabby little houses in remote locations that I fantasize about spontaneously buying and moving into. In 2017 Samatha leaves her suburban house as well as her husband and teenage daughter because “What Sam wanted was not a safe house or an escape or even a sanctuary but, rather, a place to be alone, to do some time, to change herself. Whatever she was – the sum total of fifty-three years on the earth in this body – was insufficient to what would come next. She clearly had to change. The only certainty she felt was that she had done everything wrong.” The story hinges on the question: is she running away from her life or running towards it? But the book also gives a broad overview of current American and online culture from the point of view of an individual who feels like she's underrated by her own family and ignored by the larger society.
The house (which exists in a bad neighbourhood of Syracuse) doesn't play as central a role in the story as the premise might make it seem. There's little descriptive detail about her making the house her own beyond: “After the closing, she fixed the house enough for her to move in.” Instead, the story focuses more on the strained relationship she has with her family: her ill mother who won't confide in her about the nature of her illness, her emotionally-distant daughter who doesn't respond to her daily texts and her husband who still provides financial assistant (as well as the occasional booty call.) She also tests the water in making new connections with other women after her despair about Trump entering the White House. Samantha struggles with insomnia or 'The Mids' where she's wide awake in the middle of the night. She makes the perilous decision of spending a lot of time online where she meets some other women who've formed specialised private groups such as one called “The Hardcore Hags”. The individuals she meets feel similarly alienated from the lives and surroundings they've grown into. Though she initially joins in their venting and rebellious behaviour, she finds little of the community she really yearns for.
Rather than being a story about Samantha renovating a house to suit her new life, Spiotta considers the clash between our ideals and the reality of the homes we make for ourselves. Samantha works in a (mostly volunteer position) at a historic house once inhabited by Clara Loomis. This is a (fictional) 19th century figure once honoured as a social pioneer but now considered suspect for her views on race and religion. At one point late in the novel we get some letters from Loomis whose joy at joining a utopian community quickly sours. A man Samantha's daughter Ally becomes romantically involved with takes part in gentrifying a historic building. Samantha's mother Lily becomes reluctant to leave the idyllic house she's come to live in once she realises that her time is limited. Rather than being abodes we can rely upon as sources of comfort and community we've found ourselves psychologically hemmed in because of the state of our current culture – before we physically became housebound by the 2020 pandemic. Spiotta's novel presents a compelling point of view and contains more subtly than is immediately apparent. However, I found myself admiring what this book was trying to do rather than feeling fully invested in the story offered.
