Susanna Moore is best known for her stylishly explicit 1995 novel, “In the Cut,” in which a New York City teacher has an affair with a detective investigating murders in her neighborhood. Three novels and nearly three decades later, Moore turns her eye again to a woman on the verge, but this time the setting is the Minnesota prairie of mid-19th-century America, and her protagonist is an abused wife who flees Rhode Island for a new life on the American frontier. Drawn in part from a true story, “The Lost Wife” explores one woman’s experience amid escalating violence against Indigenous tribes as they are pushed from their ancestral land.
Sarah Brinton narrates her story, bit by bit, in a spare, lyrical tone. Gradually, she divulges bitter memories of her neglectful mother and the infant child she left behind when she escaped from her predator husband in 1855, out of fear that he would kill her. This is the emotionally complex baggage of a woman who, in hopes of erasing all traces of her past, renames herself Sarah Browne and sets off for Native American territory. She plans to join forces with Maddie, her friend and confidante from childhood.
The grueling trip will require enduring three tedious weeks of crude travel conditions via coal-fueled locomotive, mule-drawn Erie Canal packet boat, steamship and wagon train. On an Illinois riverboat, Sarah sleeps upright, “in a slatted chair in the bow”; the hem of her dress is “stiff with dry mud”; and her face and hands, she tells us, are “swollen with mosquito bites.” Also, she continues, “there are rats, too, and I keep my feet under me. The cattle, trapped in their sodden pens, moan through the night.” By the time Sarah reaches Shakopee, Minn., where she plans to meet Maddie, she reeks from having been unable to bathe since her journey began. But there is no Maddie. She has died of cholera. So much for Sarah’s American Dream of freedom and new beginnings.
Forced to improvise, Sarah surveys the narrow possibilities before her as a self-described stout, unattached woman in her mid-20s in need of making a living in a riverbank trading town whose citizens are as coarse as they are prudish. She finds a solution when she meets and marries John Brinton, a melancholy, widowed physician. The pair have two children and move to Yellow Medicine, a community made up of federal administrators and White settlers adjacent to the Sioux reservation, where Brinton is the resident doctor.
Sarah is at last financially stable, but the accelerating tensions between Native Americans and White settlers make her uneasy, her discomfort further heightened by community pressure to cast her loyalties entirely with one side or the other. The White and the Native people live alongside each other, she reflects, but in two increasingly unreconcilable and unequal worlds, with the U.S. government herding the tribes into ever-smaller reservations and limiting rations to starvation levels, while Sarah and her White neighbors live in comfort. Sarah nevertheless tries to build her own bridge by befriending Native people, learning the Dakota language and joining them to smoke pipes together. But the peace is short-lived, ended by the abrupt outbreak of the Dakota War of 1862.
Moore takes the outline of what happens next from Sarah F. Wakefield’s 1864 autobiographical account, “Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees.” Both the historical and the fictional Sarah and their children are seized by the Sioux and held for the six weeks in terrorized captivity. They witness gory carnage committed by both sides. And after they are freed, both find themselves shunned by the community, mocked for being overly sympathetic to the enemy.
What they are guilty of instead, Moore’s novel asserts, is empathy for the suffering of the oppressed. The federal officers investigating the uprising “only write down what they want to hear,” ignoring any testimony that speaks well of the captors as well as Sarah’s plea for clemency for the Sioux warrior whose actions saved her and her children’s lives.
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Moore’s title captures not only Sarah’s anguish but also that of all the lost wives and lost souls whose illusions had carried them to a vaunted frontier whose promise had become saturated in blood. In replacing long-held legends with traumas, Moore’s steely vision of the American West recognizes few, if any, heroes. The result is a repudiation — solemn yet stirring — of the idealized fable of the American West.
Diane Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.”
The Lost Wife
By Susanna Moore
Knopf. 192 pp. $27
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