LEVITATIONS

When its long-abandoned mine is reopened to harvest “space rocks,” a New England town becomes a hotbed for strange visitors in this darkly funny, offbeat debut for fans of George Saunders and Joy Williams.

Millions of years ago, an asteroid crashed into the earth near what is now known as Leefield, a New England town that has seen better days. The mills and factories have long closed, as has the mine on the hill, which now plays host to a cult that rakes rocks in hopes of absorbing extraterrestrial dust. But when the mine on their hill is reopened by shady investors hoping to stir up speculation in “space rocks,” Leefield is transformed overnight into a hotbed of conspiracy theorists, activists, and antagonists. It enters the twenty-first century.

Levitations is a novel that contains multitudes. There’s a fast-thinking, disillusioned activist who has fled to sleepy Leefield from southern California; a trio of high schoolers peering at the world through a haze of YouTube; a failed Marxist academic haunted by the specter of Slavoj Žižek; and then there’s the cult. When one of the high schoolers disappears and another mysteriously levitates near an auxiliary entrance to the mine, a series of events are set in motion that spell disaster but also, maybe, renewal.

Easton Smith’s impressive debut gives voice to all of these characters, but also to chickens, knives, and even the town of Leefield itself. Like Joy Williams, Russell Banks, and George Saunders, Smith goes deep into American characters—their big-hearted hopes, their deep-rooted despairs, and, as Thomas Pynchon once put it, their “extended capacity for convolution.”