The Floating World
C. Morgan Babst, 2017
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616205287
Summary
In this dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, C. Morgan Babst takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina and the life of a great city.
As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdore refuses to leave the city.
Her parents, Joe Boisdore, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic — the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself.
This mystery is at the center of Babst’s haunting and profound novel.
Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the successful life she built in New York City to find her hometown in ruins and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to figure out what happened to her sister, she must also reckon with the racial history of the city and the trauma of a disaster that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy visited on New Orleans’s most vulnerable citizens.
Separately and together, each member of the Boisdore clan must find the strength to remake home in a city forever changed.
The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told—one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a vivid, intimate understanding of this particular place and its tangled past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. She studied writing at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Yale, and NYU, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as Garden and Gun, Oxford American, Guernica, Harvard Review, and New Orleans Review. The Floating World is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
In scripture, the great flood was a purifying event. When, after 40 days and nights, the rain ceased and the waters receded, wickedness had been cleansed from the earth. (It grew back stronger than ever, but never mind.) But real floods, C. Morgan Babst reminds us in The Floating World… don’t wash away human contamination; they bring it to the surface.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
The Floating World is the most striking New Orleans novel inspired by Hurricane Katrina so far, a story as complex and nonlinear as the map of the Crescent City, interweaving the troubles caused by the storm with the specific difficulties one family already faced before the first raindrop fell.
Marion Winik - Newsday
Set in New Orleans, this important and powerful novel follows the Boisdore family…in the months after Katrina. A profound, moving and authentically detailed picture of the storm’s emotional impact on those who lived through it.
People
C. Morgan Babst's portrait of a troubled New Orleans family that fractures further during and after Hurricane Katrina is poetic and suspenseful.… [A]n ambitious novel.
NPR.org
This is a spot-on examination of race and the tumult natural disasters leave in their wake.
Marie Claire
This powerful family drama (with a mystery at its core) promises to be an emotional read. A dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, The Floating World takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina with the story of the Boisdores, whose roots stretch back nearly to the foundation of New Orleans.
Paste Magazine
This unforgettable and timely novel tells the story of those who lost everything in the hurricane and the lives they sought to rebuild.
RealSimple.com
Set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this wrenching and hypnotic book will give you chills with its descriptions of the flooding.
Bustle
Babst’s tightly written debut focuses on the fractured Boisdore clan, whose familial tensions are brought to a head in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.… [T]his is a riveting novel about the inescapable pull of family.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) A richly written, soak-in-it kind of book.… The mystery of what really happened unfolds with breath-holding poignancy throughout the shifting narrative.… Utterly affecting.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] powerful, important novel.… Deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book::
1. In The Floating World, the flood functions as both plot point and symbol. It "had hidden the mess, lifted everything up, given the city of a sense of buoyancy." What is the meaning of that observation? What is the mess that is hidden, and what is lifted up — both literally and figuratively?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: How else does the storm become a metaphor? Consider the uprooted magnolia tree that has crashed through the roof or the water that puts everything adrift.
3. How was it that Cora is left in New Orleans while her parents evacuated? Is Joe to be blamed for her refusal to leave?
4. Describe the Boisdore couple, Joe and Tess, and their marriage. What are the fissures in their relationship that are widened irreparably during Katrina? What slights, aspirations, observations, and disappointments do Joe and Tess grapple with yet rarely discuss openly?
5. How would you describe Del as well as her relationship with her family? What effect does her return to New Orleans have on the rest of the Boisdores?
6. In what way do race and culture drive the action of this novel, as much as, perhaps even more so, than Katrina?
7. Talk about Vincent Boisdore, Joe's father. In what way does he behave as both an old man and a child?
8. "Grief was infinite, though wasn't it something like love that, divided, did not diminish?" What does that question / observation mean, and how does it apply to members of the Boisdore family?
9. Whose narrative point of view most engaged you in this novel?
10. “MAKE GOOD, as if any good could be made out of what was, essentially, a hate crime of municipal proportions.” In what way are racism and class responsible for the Katrina debacle?
11. Consider each of the ways the Boisdore family members live up to the last line of the novel: "I'm home."
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)