Summer Reading: Adam Gnade's "Float Me Away, Floodwaters"

American personal fiction at its finest.

Each summer, I somehow fall down rabbit holes chasing artists and writers who evade mainstream popularity, but thankfully have a decent fan base that sustains my descent. How these artists do so is a mystery because their work has an “it” factor that pushes me to binge-read/listen to all of the work they’ve produced in a few days tops (see Connan Mockasin for last summer’s addiction and google “Connan Mockasin Live at Sundae Sessions” for a gem - and for a Mac DeMarco appearance if you watch closely).

This year, the culprit is Adam Gnade, whose artist’s statement begins with “[m]y goal as an artist is to create a personal history of America, to tell how it was to live when I lived, to show the ugly, the beautiful, and the things we don’t always see.” Gnade’s Float Me Away, Floodwaters, a $10 “pocketsize novel concerning modern farm living, wayward country punks, and the New Old West” was my introduction to his work. It caught my eye as I was leaving Trident Booksellers and Cafe, an indie bookstore in Boulder, CO, because the book was so physically small and stood out from the other books in a display highlighting independent publishers. I was on my way to the airport and needed something portable and easily readable to keep me company on a couple of short flights. I flipped it open, skimmed a few lines that dropped me into Gnade’s America, and decided it was good enough reading for the next few hours.

I finished Float Me Away, Floodwaters as my second flight touched down in South Bend, Indiana, and I promise that being in the Midwest as the book’s narrative concluded at the protagonist’s farm, scenery that matched that of the farms surrounding where I grew up, has nothing to do with how tightly Gnade’s work gripped me. Okay, fine, I am a bit biased, but only because Gnade captures hometown beers and grocery-store taco dinners so universally. I received a piece of writing advice, that specific writing = universal results, a few weeks ago, and Gnade has mastered this strategy. The reader follows the protagonist from a languid day in a river out West, a river which he leaves with a new t-shirt from a tattooed bootlegger, the memorable Lakeside Speed Wayne (shout that, because Wayne always does - “Lakeside Speed Wayyynnee!”) who asks him for a lighter mid-river and sells said shirts from his van, to a drive home after those hometown beers with his girlfriend, Alison, dozing in his passenger seat. Gnade interweaves these quick windows into the protagonist’s travels on his book tour and life on his farm with bits of real, existential dread. The protagonist suppresses thoughts that he’ll die one day, that we all will, and chooses to keep pushing forward through economic troubles, having to leave the farm he and Alison are renting, and dealing with the waves of change and fear that accompany all transition periods. Gnade leaves the reader with incantations that drift the book’s conclusion into meditation, which rounds it off nicely with a way forward for the reader, should they need it.

I don’t want to spoil too much of this novella, but I’ll leave you with an excerpt so that you can experience some of Gnade firsthand:

“I think about how much smarter I was when I was a kid and that makes me think of Frankie’s boys. In my bag in the backseat I have a letter I wrote them before leaving the farm … The letter reads, “I hope when you’re older you remember your early days with me, and I hope what you remember is good. I hope you have a life where they want nothing but happiness for you, where no one will use your name as a joke or an insult” (Float Me Away, Floodwaters 22).

I’m only at the beginning of what has already become an Adam Gnade obsession (I ordered two of his novels and am about to buy as many as I can possibly find through online used bookstores) and a quick Google search reveals his substantial body of work - I don’t want to sell it short. Do yourself a favor and check out his website, or your favorite local bookstore that stocks independently-published gems.