Book Review: ‘Us Fools,’ by Nora Lange

US FOOLS, by Nora Lange

Joanne’s voice has always been in Bernadette’s head. The Fareown sisters can’t escape each other, even if they can escape their roots. Growing up on their Illinois farm in the 1980s, Jo and Bernie have learned to fend for themselves, largely by sticking together.

Their parents, distracted by the farm crisis that is burying their neighbors and much of rural America with them, spend most of their time “lovingly fondling each other like a set of keys.” The girls are restless and hungry, sick of the bland food their chain-smoking mother serves them. Instead, they devour Nietzsche and Woolf, home-schooling each other in their attic.

In “Us Fools,” Nora Lange’s tender, exquisitely funny and supremely strange debut novel about these sisters, nothing much happens. Also, everything happens. The story opens in 1987 with Jo, age 11, taking a leap from the family’s roof, to “experience falling.” She’s the charismatic older sister, prone to violence and performance art, and Bernie, our narrator, is nearly effaced by her sister’s outsize shadow. Bernie dreams of a different life, one in which she can afford vitamins and other modern luxuries, and she tries to fight the designation her sister gives them: “junk kids.” But, like most of Jo’s forceful visions, it proves irresistible.

The opening pages inform us that we are looking back at their childhood from 2009, as Bernadette holes up in a Super 8 in Bloomington, Minn., to make sense of her family’s history, “examining the contents of our lives like receipts.” The sisters are grown, and Joanne, still unpredictable as ever, wants a baby.

In between these two coordinates, we travel with the Fareowns from the farm to Chicago and then to Deadhorse, Alaska, as Bernie tries to cure herself of “love-loathing” her sister. Bernie goes to college, Jo goes to an institution. But these and other medium-size events — deaths, moves, breakups, jobs, the stuff of most novels — take place between commas. They are the clauses dependent on Bernadette’s enduring interests: grand observations and minute movements. “Back in the Midwest,” she recalls in an early chapter, “the rate of suicide rose, so too did the number of New Coke haters.”

In almost every exhilarating sentence, Lange tries to plug the vast, diseased expanse of our country’s history into this particular set of characters it has doomed: “The term ‘nuclear family’ had been installed in America like the questionable electric wiring in our house, which would fail.”