“Thrust,” the latest novel from UO alumna Lidia Yuknavitch, is many things. It’s a vision of dystopia. It’s a historical character study. It’s a critique of the U.S. prison system. And it’s an erotic epistolary.
Yuknavitch brings together a wide range of stories and anecdotes, histories of people and animals and things, in a sprawling literary reflection on the power of story and sexuality.
At the heart of the novel is Laisvé, an idiosyncratic girl fond of collecting lost objects and knowledge in the year 2085. Sea levels have risen, drowning the Statue of Liberty, and violent police raids are a constant concern for Laisvé and her father, Aster. Like Yuknavitch herself, Laisvé is a swimmer, yet she has a unique gift: When she swims through water, she travels through time.
The idea of traveling through time via water seems exemplary of Yuknavitch’s literary philosophy. In her popular 2011 memoir “The Chronology of Water,” she writes: “All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology.”
So Yuknavitch writes Laisvé’s story out of order. She meets a group of laborers assembling the Statue of Liberty, a caseworker trying to save an incarcerated teen and a businesswoman with a secret school for children. These main narratives are supplemented with countless trivial anecdotes — listing the different types of U.S. pennies, sharing a cursory history of the tin can and describing the speciation of the genus Equus, to name a few.
Through all these distinct but interrelated stories, Yuknavitch shows us all the things stories are capable of. She reminds us of the power of stories. Stories function as an affirmation of our existence, a form of memory and time travel, a way of making sense of things, an act of love. Stories serve to connect us, comfort us, soothe our guilt, help us survive, give us agency and pleasure. Stories can be harmful, imprisoning us, forcing us to relive our trauma, or they can be empowering acts of resistance. Stories can spark radical change.
An important motif of “Thrust” is the Statue of Liberty, to which Yuknavitch returns time and time again. She mentions how the original design was to have held broken chains in her left hand although the chains were ultimately hidden at her feet. The significance of this detail, representing the abolition of slavery, was lost, and the story changed. Likewise, the stories of the laborers of the statue, like those of other immigrant laborers, were forgotten, overshadowed by the magnitude of the national symbols they helped create. Yuknavitch asks us to remember them.
“Thrust” often has a folkloric quality. Laisvé talks to animals. She receives guidance from a turtle, whales, worms and even mycelia. They tell each other stories. Early in the novel, Laisvé tells the turtle Bertrand that she lived in the belly of a whale that was a boat. When Bertrand asks if the whale is a metaphor, Lasivé tells him impatiently, “The whale was also a whale.” The reality of this story is unclear, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Laisvé asks us to accept that the whale is both literal and metaphorical. Yuknavitch asks us to accept stories as literal and metaphorical. A story’s truthfulness doesn’t determine its meaning or power.
“Thrust” is a decidedly feminist work, at times reading like a manifesto more than a novel. Its most compelling and outspoken character is Aurora, the entrepreneur who runs a hidden school for children disabled by dangerous labor. Yuknavitch emphasizes the importance of education for children, demanding that children are not merely trained for industry but well fed and cared for, allowed to exist fully and “invent their own world.” Children are the future for Yuknavitch.
When not working with the kids in Room 8, Aurora manages and rents her other rooms to adults. There is the Room of Vibrations, the Room of Textures, the Room of Kneelings and more, each offering unique sexual experiences. It is through Aurora that Yuknavitch makes it clear what she means by the novel’s title.
Yuknavitch identifies the disregard our nation has for our bodies, evident in exploitative labor and the physical and sexual violence characters endure. Aurora is someone who challenges “the idiotic limits of the ridiculous reproductive impulse.” She believes in the transcendent, “cosmic possibility” of sexuality that carries people to “both a thrust and a devouring” of greater pleasure.
“Thrust” has two different senses. A thrust as a physical push, a movement of the body, is an erotic act, an impulse of pleasure. Thrust also denotes the principal purpose of something: an intention. Aurora’s thrust is sexual, personal and political. She is a character who proudly proclaims sex for pleasure rather than reproduction. Yuknavitch draws critical attention to the dominant discourse of sexuality in our nation –– one that mandates that sex occurs only between cisgender heterosexual men and women for the purpose of reproduction, that non-reproductive sex is dangerous and sinful. Aurora resists these social restrictions. She claims power for herself.
“Thrust” is an ambitious novel, so wide-reaching that it may feel to some readers spread too thin across its different times and characters. But it is the novel’s fragmentary nature that makes it interesting. If you trust Yuknavitch, you can delight in finding connections, watching the separate streams of the story converge as a river leading to an ocean of answers, reflective and deep for exploration: a reminder of the beauty of water, the nature of time, the formlessness of truth, the power of pleasure, and our place in history and the world.
