Year We Left Home (Thompson)

Book Reviews
It's [the] sense of the familiar revivified—of knowing what's coming yet being emotionally outflanked by it anyway—that best characterizes The Year We Left Home, an extraordinarily warmhearted novel whose impressive humanity and lightness of touch refresh some narrative elements so abundantly precedented that most fiction writers would have been afraid to go near them…with its episodic, home-centered structure, its stealthy gallop through time and its distribution of point-of-view duties among the increasingly estranged members of a nuclear family, [the novel] invites, and withstands, comparisons to Evan S. Connell's novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, two (or really one) of the great American fictions of the last century.
Jonathan Dee - New York Times Book Review


Startlingly good.... You may forget that the characters don’t really exist, that the Iowa farm family so expertly drawn by the author never drew breath themselves, that most of the events that transpire across the book’s three-decade span aren’t part of the historical record.
Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune


[A] rich, detailed, resonant, emotionally spot-on novel.... Thompson has a light, exquisite touch. The Year We Left Home feels weightless as a result. By the end of the novel, the reader knows more about the Ericksons than even the Ericksons. The effect is enormously satisfying, allowing the reader not only to connect the dots but to fill in the blanks the author shrewdly leaves wide open.
Bill Eichenberger - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Lovely.... Told with extraordinary grace.... The clan at the center of Jean Thompson’s spare, startlingly resonant new novel remain inextricably linked to the place that made them, even as they reach for lives richer in both geography and purpose. But even minor characters receive the full attention of the author’s prodigious talents; each one is drawn so vividly that they never feel less than utterly real.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly


Bookended by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq—Thompson's third novel (after the collection Do Not Deny Me) sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: "she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure." The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita, the beauty of the family, celebrates her marriage. Over the years, however, Anita confronts dissatisfaction with herself and disillusionment with her pompous husband. Her younger brother, Ryan, a high school senior as the novel opens, longs to escape his rural roots, dating a hippie poet and majoring in political science before realizing that the farmers who came before him might hold more relevance than he'd imagined. Cousin Chip comes back from Vietnam troubled and aimless, his wanderings from Seattle to Reno, Nev., to Veracruz, Mexico, offering a parallel to the spiritual restlessness all the other characters feel. Told from the point of view of more than a half-dozen characters, the vignettes that make up the narrative are generally powerful in isolation, but as a whole fail to develop into anything more than a series of snapshots of a family touched by time and tragedy.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Dazzling.... Unforgettable.... A masterful wide-angle portrait of an Iowa family over three decades.... Thompson’s ability to put these characters empathically on the page, in their special setting, over an extended period of years, with just the right dose of dark humor, rivals Richard Russo’s.... The novel is a powerful reflection on middle American life—on the changes wrought by the passing years and the values that endure.
Kirkus Reviews