Thrust is a fascinating post-apocalyptic novel, loosely built around the Statue of Liberty, told from many points of view in many individual stories. First is Laisvė, a girl from Siberia who has immigrated with her father to America. She is a “carrier” who can move back and forth in time using the energy of inanimate objects and who can communicate with sea animals. Then there is a series of letters between Frédéric in France (who seems to be Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor who created the Statue of Liberty) and his cousin, Aurora Boréales, a woman who runs a bizarre combination of a brothel and an orphans’ home in the United States; they are joined in an erotic connection. There are also the men and women who build the Statue of Liberty, as well as an assortment of other odd characters, including a boy accused of patricide and infanticide and a talking box turtle named Bertrand.
The post-apocalyptic aspect comes from the melting of the glaciers and permafrost, resulting in the rising of the ocean level to the point that only the Statue of Liberty’s head remains out of the water. Mankind reverts to a primal existence: a police state is rising, there are “raids” to supply child soldiers, people live in rudimentary shelters in old nonfunctioning buildings, etc. As the permafrost melts, mammoth skeletons rise and a new trade in mammoth tusk ivory replaces the trade in elephant ivory.
Another interesting aspect is the role language plays: dead languages, dying languages, ancestral languages. Here are a few of the amazing lines I highlighted: “narrating sounds and languages … I believe that this itself was a kind of love”; “an infant crying for its mother’s breast is its own language in any language”; and “the death of languages is what precedes the death of the world.”
Thrust is so truly genre-breaking that it’s hard to slot this unique novel in a specific bookshelf as it combines historical fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, feminism, surrealism, magical realism, speculative fiction, dystopic fiction, climate fiction, erotica, and LGBTQI+ fiction. Despite these multiple stories, I never felt lost or disjointed; somehow, Yuknavitch blends all these scraps into a magnificent quilt.
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Thrust (Riverhead Books, Reprint edition, June 27, 2023) is available through:
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