CANR

• The Floating World ( novel) Algonquin (Chapel Hill, NC), 2017

1.  The floating world LCCN 2017020400 Type of material Book Personal name Babst, C. Morgan, 1980- author. Main title The floating world / C. Morgan Babst. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books, 2017. Projected pub date 1710 Description pages cm ISBN 9781616205287 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• Amazon -

  C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. She studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and NYU, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as Garden and Gun, The Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, and the New Orleans Review. The Floating World is her first novel.

• Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-floating-world-q-a-with-c-morgan-babst_us_59e60d58e4b04e9111a3e4fa

  The Floating World: Q & A With C. Morgan Babst
  10/17/2017 10:08 am ET

  With all the recent storm activity plaguing the Southeastern United States, reading The Floating World by C. Morgan Babst set during the aftermath Hurricane Katrina can seem like art predicting life all over again. This book presents a timeless exploration of what it means to be home and the things families can do to us and for us—both good and bad.
  How do you define home? How does this novel define it?
  During the decade I lived in New York—a period that felt like a brief sojourn, though it was long enough time for me to get a degree, take and lose a couple of jobs, meet and marry my husband, and birth a child—people would look at me funny when I referred to New Orleans as “home.”
  “But you’ve been here seven years,” they’d say, “You get to call yourself a New Yorker now.”
  I knew the subway system by heart—I once even schooled the new owner of an appetizing shop on the brand of cream cheese he should carry (and he still carries it)—but I was not, I insisted, a New Yorker. I was in exile there.
  We’re particular about home in New Orleans. We’re touchy about nativity, longevity, about who gets to claim this messy, lovely city as their own. Even the word “from” is loaded; for us it means that you were born here—and probably your mama should’ve been born here, and maybe her mama too. It wasn’t until I went away that I realized that “from” means other things to other people, that you can be “from” whatever place it is you go back to.
  My best attempt at a definition is this: home is the place that made you. Often that place is not the place where you grew up—it might be the college town where you came into your own or the city you chose to live in because it offered you the freedom to be yourself. New Orleans doesn’t give her children any choice in the matter, though: like a mother, she claims you as her own, knows you intimately, demands your loyalty—and when you go home, she feeds you red beans and rice.
  In The Floating World, the Boisdorés are all struggling with the aftermath of the near-destruction of their home—not just their house, bashed in by a falling magnolia and riddled with mold, but their city, flooded, abandoned, and suddenly unable to care for her own. As the family works to rebuild, each character has to redefine home according to what they most need it to be.
  One of your characters makes a point that whenever something is broken, it is the fault of the maker. Do you agree or disagree with him?

  Subscribe to The Morning Email.
  Wake up to the day's most important news.

  This line comes at the end of a scene in which Vincent, the patriarch of the family, is struggling to impart some of his knowledge to his granddaughter Del, who had once seemed likely to inherit the family tradition of cabinetmaking. She’s not being careful enough for his taste, angrily patching over damage in an heirloom hope chest rather than working carefully to improve the piece. His point is that frustration never produces good work; if a problem seems intractable, that’s because you’re just not trying hard enough to find the solution. But Del takes his advice slant: she hears him saying that she’s brought her current troubles down upon herself.
  One of the reasons I love writing fiction is that I don’t have to choose sides. Answers are out; it’s the questions that matter. In this novel, I wanted to explore how we, as individuals, face challenges that seem insurmountable. How does one begin to address a catastrophe of municipal proportion? Is it helpful to track backwards to the root causes of a disaster and discover who is to blame? Certainly the Boisdorés have a lot to regret; they have arrived at this state of ruin through a cascade of failures—of levees, of love—that they should have been able to predict and to prepare for. They have to reckon with that, but their more urgent concern is figuring out how to move out towards the future.

  Craig Mulcahy
  After immersing yourself in this narrative, what did you come away with? What did you learn about yourself? What are you working on next?
  Though The Floating World is my debut, is actually the third novel I’ve written. In some ways, I see those earlier books as apprentice pieces; like Vincent’s hope chest, they helped me hone my skills—taught me how to tell a story, structure a plot—but I didn’t put enough of myself into either of them. This novel, on the other hand, was an act of love. It felt necessary, as if I might drown if I didn’t translate all my love and grief for my city into words. I think that it succeeds where my drawer novels failed because that emotional investment shows on the page. As I move forward into my next novel—a noir about whiteness that I hope will end up being intense (and short!)—I am trying to maintain that level of emotional nakedness, so that the reader will experience, along with me, a moral drama that feels like a wallop to the chest.
  This book paints a necessarily bleak portrait of New Orleans; what are some of the bright spots that you treasure about this place? What do you want people to know about New Orleans beyond Katrina?
  I hope that, under the lake mud, the mold, and the water-stains, readers will still be able to see the New Orleans that existed before the storm and exists now again, if in an altered form. I actually wasn’t able to start writing the book until I knew that all would end, if not well, then with some hope that the New Orleans that made me would survive. It has. New Orleans is still a wet and verdant city, where strangers greet each other beside the walls of cemeteries with a nod and an “Alright,” where the smell of browned butter mingles with the sound of distant drums. We may not all be all right again—not that we ever were—but we’re working on it, and that gives me hope that, even after this summer of earthquakes and fires, tremendous storms and torrential rains, everyone from Houston to Barbuda will find the strength to get back up again.

• Powells - http://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-c-morgan-babst-author-of-the-floating-world

  Q&As
  Powell's Q&A: C. Morgan Babst, Author of 'The Floating World'

  by C. Morgan Babst, October 17, 2017 9:38 AM

  Photo credit: Craig Mulcahy

  Describe your latest book.
  For several months — maybe years — following the near-destruction of New Orleans by the levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, I wandered around telling everybody that everything was fine. I was fine, my family was fine, the city was going to be fine. Now, obviously, I was lying, but I didn’t know it at the time. It can take a while to absorb the fact that your home and everyone you know is in a state of ruin. 

  If I am remembering right (and I am not sure of the truth of anything I remember from those years), I was still saying things were peachy when I began to write The Floating World, the story of a New Orleans family who leave their fragile eldest daughter, Cora, to ride out the storm on her own. Since my days of being lovelorn on public transportation, though, writing has always been the way I cope — it’s the way I trick myself into grieving. 

  By writing the story of Cora, who refuses to engage with what happened to her during the month she spent adrift in the flooded city, I learned acceptance. By sitting with Joe and Tess, whose marriage is ravaged by regret and recrimination, I explored the difficulty of trying to enter into someone else’s grief. In Del’s anger, I gave voice to my rage. In the loss of Vincent’s memory, I began recovering my own. 

  This is not to say that the book was a self-help project — though it didn’t hurt. Rather, I hope the The Floating World reflects, in an honest way, the experience of grappling with and recovering from the sort of large-scale trauma that New Orleans suffered in 2005 — and that Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, Barbuda, and Mexico City (to name just a few) are dealing with today.

  What was your favorite book as a child? 
  I’ll be a Shel Silverstein fan ‘til I die. The chicken-scratch silliness of his verses was probably the first thing to incite a creative urge in me — there’s a wildness and a freedom to them that can’t help but excite. The poem “Crowded Tub” from A Light in the Attic is — along with some Merwin, a bit of Bishop, and The Jabberwocky — one of the few poems I know by heart: 

  There’s too many kids in this tub
  There’s too many elbows to scrub
  I just washed a behind that I know isn’t mine
  There’s too many kids in this tub.

  Though I’ve chosen to believe that Shel wrote The Giving Tree under some kind of Misery-esque duress, I love his prosier books too — none of them more than Lafcadio, which is basically a novel (and a thesis on colonialism) for five-year-olds. It can still make me laugh so hard water comes out of my nose, and I do believe that one day, when I’m old and famous, I’m going to get myself a marshmallow suit.

  When did you know you were a writer?
  The moment I chose to be a writer is one of those unnaturally vivid memories:

  My dad and I are driving down Napoleon towards Broad, the grassy neutral ground streaming by to the left, the smell of Popeye’s thickening the air. He says to me, “You’re going to NOCCA next year,” and I blink for a minute, as if the lights have just been turned on. 

  (I’d been at the same Catholic school, with the same 56 girls, for 10 years at that point, and the idea that I’d be going to another school — and a public arts conservatory at that, with the likes of the Marsalis brothers — seemed incredible.)

  “So, are you going to sing, or are you going to write?” my dad asks.

  I barely have to think about it. It’s obvious that I will be perfectly happy reading and writing every day. Singing? Not so much. 

  It frightens me a little bit to wonder what would have happened had I not gone to NOCCA, where I studied with the wonderful writers Anne Gisleson, Brad Richard, and Tom Whalen. I truly have no idea who I would have become had I not spent those 15 hours a week, every week, for three years, reading and writing at a pace that I haven’t surpassed since. 

  After college, I would occasionally try to shrug off writing — it was scary, it was crazy, I didn’t really want to live in a van down by the river. I tried working in publishing, tried teaching, tried restaurants, but I could never get my heart into anything else. Eventually I jumped off of the cliff and committed to writing as a profession, and I haven’t looked back since.

  What does your writing workspace look like?
  I have a bit of an index card problem: I use them as bookmarks in whatever I’m reading, so that if I find a quote that I think I’ll need or have a “genius” idea, I can write it down before it slinks away. To deal with the resulting million very important 5" x 7” scraps of paper, I have wallpapered my home office in cork so that I can pin them to the walls, designing thematic and plot structures as I go along. It looks like chaos to everyone else, I’m sure, but to me it’s a marvel of organization.

  What do you care about more than most people around you?
  I’m probably problematically attached to New Orleans. I think I’m actually in love with the city… only it’s a little hard to tell if it loves me back. 

  The other night we had a bunch of people over for dinner, and a friend’s husband started going off on the city — complaining about the infrastructure, the bus schedules, the schools. I had to excuse myself before I got violent. I mean, so what if we have boil-water advisories every other month? Who needs buses when we have charming street cars that go 10 mph (when they go)? And the schools are getting better; since Katrina we’ve gone from 49th in the nation to 42nd! Sure we have problems — some new, some old, some intractable — but the thing is: You don’t dis my love in my kitchen. No matter what you say, she will always be my dangerously verdant, stiflingly humid, roux-thick, death-obsessed, trombone-playing love.  

  Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
  This is probably not news to your erudite readers, but everybody should be reading Maggie Nelson. Her brain is a wonderland, and her writing is a direct passage into that brain. Argonauts is the best place to start — a fragmented but accessible and terribly moving memoir of transition. After that, you can read Bluets, then The Red Parts. Please save The Art of Cruelty until the very very end.
   
  What's the most interesting job you've ever had?
  Right after college, I worked as a wrangler on a dude ranch in Colorado, throwing saddles and taking tourists on long rides out into the heart of the national forest that bordered the property on all sides. As a Comparative Literature major, I’d been studying a lot of theory, slowly losing my grip on the immediate world and any ability I’d had to write about it. That summer of sunburn and sweat, pushing horses out of the hills at dawn and drinking Coors Lights in the bed of a truck at dusk, brought me back down to earth. 

  Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage? 
  I spent several months in St. Petersburg, primarily because that was where Nabokov grew up (and I needed to get better at Russian if I was going to graduate). His parents’ house by the Neva was… full of marquetry. But while rambling in the woods with friends I made in class — a brilliant budding linguist and a crazy Swedish woman — I fell straight into the world of the novels I loved, a place where you might stumble upon the rusted hulk of a beached Imperial ship or be invited into a cottage by a strange old woman to have marinated mushrooms. 

  Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
  This is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Trans. Stephen Mitchell):

  "To be loved means to be consumed in flames. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure."

  What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
  I despise what I call aftermarket words — redundant new forms of preexisting words like “irregardless.” I’m also a strenuous defender of the Oxford comma.

  Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
  I’ve been known to drive 30 miles off the highlighted route to get chicken fingers and a butterfinger blizzard from Dairy Queen.

  What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
  In the last class of the course he taught at NYU, E. L. Doctorow sat with his elbows on the table and gave us all the wisdom.

  On not getting caught up in research: “Only writing is writing.”
   
  On avoiding outlines: “You don’t want to be in a position of filling in what you already know.” 

  On second-guessing yourself: “Shut up.”

  I was writing it down in my notebook so fast that some of the sentences trailed off, and I think it’s funny — and fitting — that the bit of advice that has been most helpful to me is the one that I had to fill in later from memory:

  “Trust the act of writing to tell you what you need to know.”

  This bit of advice has influenced my writing in every way, from how I compose (longhand, with my critical faculty turned off) to how I revise (read a draft like a stranger to better mine it for its knowledge — which may be different from my own). 

  My Top Five Books on Mourning
  While writing The Floating World, I surrounded myself, probably less than wholesomely, with the books that reflected my grief. These were not always, or even often, books about Katrina; with the exception of Rose’s book, the books I picked up about the storm were too orderly to feel true. To achieve catharsis, what I needed to read and to write was something curdled, off-kilter, like the keening of a woman at a grave. For me, these are the five books that best approximate that howl:

  “Requiem” in Poems of Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova (Trans. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward)
  Akhmatova spent a year and a half standing in lines outside of a jail in Leningrad, awaiting news about her imprisoned son. During that time, she began writing “Requiem,” a poem that bears witness to Stalinist terror.

  Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (Trans. Anne Carson)
  No one but the great poet Anne Carson should be allowed to translate a scream. 

  The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
  These two novels tell the stories of the Compsons and the Sutpens in swirling eddies of narrative — there are undertows, whirlpools, waterspouts — that pull the reader inevitably under, to drown in history.

  One Dead in Attic by Chris Rose
  One Dead in Attic collects the columns following Hurricane Katrina in which Rose chronicled New Orleans in extremis. There is no more accurate reflection of the city’s distress and its unraveling.

  Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
  Ward’s memoir in five deaths unburies a history — and a present — that should cause every American to mourn.
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  C. Morgan Babst studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and N.Y.U. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as The Oxford American, Guernica, The Harvard Review, LitHub, The New Orleans Review, and her piece, "Death Is a Way to Be," was honored as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2016. She evacuated New Orleans one day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. After 11 years in New York, she now lives in New Orleans with her husband and child. The Floating World is her first book.

• C. Morgan Babst Website - http://cmorganbabst.com/

  About me
  C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. She studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and NYU, and  her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as Garden and Gun, The Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, and the New Orleans Review. The Floating World is her first novel.
  Twitter @cmorganbabst
  Instagram @cmorganbabst
  Facebook @cmorganbabst
  For inquiries of a professional variety, please contact Meredith Kaffel at DeFiore and Company .

• New Orleans Advocate - http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/entertainment_life/books/article_35004fd6-a7c3-11e7-b0f4-a75710e14da9.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=user-share

  Homecoming: Novelist Morgan Babst pours her heart into 'The Floating World'
  BY SUSAN LARSON | Special to The Advocate Oct 16, 2017 - 2:00 pm (0)

  Buy Now
  Morgan Babst poses in her home in New Orleans, La., Thursday, Sept. 28, 2017. Babst is the author of "The Floating World," a book about a family's struggles during Hurricane Katrina.
  Advocate staff photo by MAX BECHERER

  Buy Now
  'The Floating World' by Morgan Babst

  Morgan Babst looks around the cork-lined walls of her office, where images and notes are pinned for inspiration and reference, and sees a new novel taking shape. Over time, the world of that book will come to surround her.
  But outside the window overlooking her exuberant garden, there is New Orleans, layers and layers of it — the world of her childhood, the post-Katrina landscape, and the universe of her first novel, “The Floating World.” This book is a broken-hearted love letter to New Orleans — remembered and wounded and imagined — in all its complexity and fragility and trouble and possibility.
  Babst set about writing this novel eight years ago, when she was a homesick New Orleanian living in Brooklyn, struggling to cope with her own experience of evacuation and loss. Taking as her mantra, “no way out but through,” she has crafted an evocative, darkly illuminating story of a complicated biracial family blasted apart by their Katrina experience.

  The Boisdorés are an old Creole family — Joe Boisdoré is an artist who works in wood, using the skills he learned from his father, Vincent, who is descending into the world of dementia. Joe’s wife Tess Eshleman, who is white, is a psychiatrist at home in the world of Uptown society. She and Joe have separated, but both are worried about their daughter Cora, who stayed in New Orleans during the storm and was so traumatized she is now practically catatonic.
  Cora’s sister Del comes back from New York to find the family home damaged by a huge fallen magnolia, and the family shattered and broken as well. How will the Boisdorés remake their lives in this changed city?
  So the story goes — meditating on race and class and the fault lines in a city and a family. To read it is to be back in those days of daily stress and struggle, making sense of life forever changed, envisioning a way out or a way forward, and searching for the meaning of home.
  The meaning of home is one thing Morgan Babst is very clear about. She and her young family moved back to New Orleans last year and settled in on Prytania Street. She met her husband Scott Habig at a Katrina fundraiser in New York, and the plan was always to return home. Years passed, and finally, it was time.
  “My daughter, Lise, had just turned 5 and New York was becoming her place,” Babst said. “And I wanted to give her oak trees and family ... It finally became untenable to not be here. And even though I made it a crisis, it was the least traumatic transition you can imagine.”
  Babst’s family roots are wide and deep in New Orleans. Her grandfather was Clay Shaw’s defense attorney, and both her parents are lawyers. She remembers big family gatherings, crawfish boils, cooking duck gumbo and shooting water moccasins in the swamp.
  “I was always in an oak tree,” she said. “I was always getting yelled at by the golfers in Audubon Park. I’ve always been a loner, but in New Orleans, the whole city is your company.”
  Babst went to NOCCA, then to Yale, then to NYU. She has lived in France and Russia, worked in publishing. But writing, like New Orleans, is her source of happiness. “Writing this book was a way to stay in New Orleans even when I wasn’t here. I’m still writing myself home.”
  And reading herself home, too. She remembers reading Chris Rose’s pieces, “that nervous breakdown on paper, so helpful and painful.”
  To research her book, she turned to that landmark anthology, “Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization” edited by Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon; “The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans,” by Lawrence N. Powell; and “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A Story of Race and Family Secrets,” by Bliss Broyard.
  “One of the things I admire about New Orleans is its courage in the face of racial conversations,” she said.
  She’s realistic about the complex responses to fiction about Katrina. She dedicates her book “for New Orleans.” She could easily have added “with love” but that is clear from every page.
  “I just wanted to offer it to anyone who needs another depiction of what we went through here,” she said.

  Sponsored Content on the Advocate
  Wie ticken Anleger?
  By Scalable Capital -
  That time, that place, that experience — they all feel real — to Babst, to the reader too. “The world of the book is so layered over the real world,” she said, “that I can see it. I can feel it at my rib cage.”

• Kirkus Reviews - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/c-morgan-babst/#continue_reading_post

  C. Morgan Babst
  Author of THE FLOATING WORLD
  Interviewed by Megan Labrise on October 17, 2017
  New Orleans native C. Morgan Babst evacuated one day before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Three post-apocalyptic images never left her: a grim waterline, pervasive gray mud, and spray-paint X-codes tattooed by rescue crews—declaring how many saved, how many dead in every building. These visions haunt her eloquent, elegiac debut novel, The Floating World.
  “I couldn’t not write this book,” says Babst, who Kirkus reached by phone at home in New Orleans, where she now lives with her husband and child, after 11 years in New York. “Katrina was one of those things that turns your expectations or preconceptions about what life is going to be on its head.”
  Babst studied writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Yale, and NYU. Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, LitHub, and the New Orleans Review; and her treatise on New Orleans funeral culture (“Death Is a Way to Be,” Guernica, June 15, 2015) was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. 
  “I was a very young woman when it happened,” she says of Katrina, which occurred two years after she graduated college, “and I still had the naïve expectation that the world took care of its people. There’s nothing Katrina [made clearer] than the fact that that is not the case. The city was abandoned by every level of government, including the Army Corps of Engineers, and in the scramble for everybody to survive, we often abandoned each other.”
  Continue reading >

   
  Babst achieves an aching authenticity in the emotional story of the Boisdorés, descendants of old New Orleans Creoles, who leave their adult daughter, Cora, to ride out Katrina alone at the family home. After the hurricane, her parents—Joe, an artist and primary caregiver for his father, Vincent, a revered cabinetmaker with dementia; and Tess, a psychiatrist from a wealthy white uptown family—find Cora traumatized, speechless, and nearly catatonic. Their story, which flows back and forth through time, begins on October 15, 2005, 47 days after landfall:
  “The house bobbed in a dark lake,” Babst writes. “The flood was gone, but Cora still felt it wrapped around her waist, its head nestled on her hip. She laid her hands out, palms on its surface, and the drifting hem of her nightshirt fingered her thighs. Under her feet, lake bed slipped: pebbles and grit, mud broken into scales that curled up at their edges.”
  Cora has returned to the scene of a nightmare: her friend Troy’s flood-ravaged home houses the unclaimed dead body of his sister, Reyna. As she flashes on violent and frenzied memories of the storm, a ghostly refrain pervades her thoughts: “Blot it out, Mrs. Randsell had told her....Blot it out ...” she writes.
  “That scene encapsulates the entire emotional experience of Katrina—a house in the darkness,” Babst says. “Something has died, and it’s trying to take you along with it.”
  When Adelaide (“Del”) Boisdoré returns from New York to help her family rebuild, she finds her sister deranged, her parents estranged, and her grandfather implacable. The Floating World takes turns in all their consciousnesses, becoming a polyphonic portrait of a city taken by storm.
  “Being here [in New Orleans right] after the storm, it was so much easier to deal with one problem at a time: this house, this person,” Babst says. “But when we were still evacuated, watching everything happen on the screen, it was like firehoses of awfulness—your brain sort of spins out because you can’t take all that in at once. Part of my project with the book was to bring that disaster down to the level of one family, one house, one tragedy, because the media depiction of it is stultifying.”
  The aim is ably achieved. In a starred review, Kirkus calls The Floating World “deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina.”
  “There have been so many stories told about us to others,” says Babst, who dedicates the book “for New Orleans.” “I thought we needed a story that was of us and for us.”
  Megan Labrise writes “Field Notes” and features for Kirkus Reviews and is the co-host of the Kirkus podcast, Fully Booked.

Babst, C. Morgan: THE FLOATING WORLD

(Aug. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Babst, C. Morgan THE FLOATING WORLD Algonquin (Adult Fiction) $26.29 10, 17 ISBN: 978-1-61620-528-7
A New Orleans family is shattered and scattered by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath."Grief was infinite, though, wasn't it," thinks one of the characters midway through this powerful, important novel, "something like love that, divided, did not diminish." Babst's debut tracks the experiences of five family members from the pre-Katrina evacuation of the city through late November 2005, 93 days after landfall. Dr. Tess Eshleman is a psychiatrist, an Uptown blue blood married to Joe Boisdore, a Creole sculptor descended from freed slaves whose work has made it as far as the Guggenheim; the couple raised their two mixed-race daughters in a historic house on the Esplanade. By the time the hurricane drops a magnolia tree through the roof of that home, Tess and Joe have evacuated to Houston, taking with them Joe's father, who suffers from advanced Lewy body dementia and was in an institution until it shut down for the storm. Their daughter Cora, who struggles with mental illness and depression, refused to leave with the family, then cannot be found when they return. By the time their other daughter, Del, arrives from New York City in October, the pressures of the storm have driven Tess and Joe to separate--and though Cora has been found, drinking tea with an elderly friend of the family in the ruins of her garden, she is catatonic. Much of the plot is devoted to unpacking exactly what happened to her during the storm and the flood. This novel is New Orleans to the bone, an authentic, detailed picture of the physical and emotional geography of the city, before, during, and after the tragedy, its social strata, its racial complications, the zillion cultural details that define its character: the parrots in the palm trees, the pork in the green beans, the vein in the shrimp, "the goddamned tacky way he flew his Rex flag out of season." Deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Babst, C. Morgan: THE FLOATING WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA500364945&it=r&asid=c5a621e7e986ace6261170efba98fb92. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364945

The Floating World

Annie Bostrom
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Floating World. By C. Morgan Babst. Oct. 2017.384p. Algonquin, $26.95 (9781616205287).
In New Orleans, one month after Hurricane Katrina, the extended Boisdore clan is painfully adrift. Joe and Tess can hardly welcome their daughter Del when she returns from New York, so preoccupied are they with their older daughter Cora, who is physically present but unreachable; Joe's dad, whose dementia is rapidly progressing; and their own, crumbling marriage. When Joe and Tess obeyed the prestorm mandatory-evacuation order, Cora stayed behind. She had lived through storms; how bad could it be? Unfathomable, in fact. In the aftermath, while her family worried that they'd lost her, Cora helped rescue others, her friend's two young nephews in particular. But now Cora is mysteriously stricken with a sense of responsibility for the boys' mother's death. Babst closely follows each Boisdore, reconstructing the histories of their racially blended family, their decimated city, and what went on while Cora was the only member of the family there. Waving through time in chapters labeled with the number of days before or after Katrina's landfall, Babst's debut will appropriately unmoor readers, too.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Floating World." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA509161555&it=r&asid=343cf44e29036243b4074867af522718. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161555

The Floating World

264.33 (Aug. 14, 2017): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Floating World
C. Morgan Babst. Algonquin, $26.95 (384p) ISBN 978-1-61620-528-7
Babst's tightly written debut focuses on the fractured Boisdore clan, whose familial tensions are brought to a head in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Six weeks after the storm, Joe, an absent-minded furniture maker separated from his wife, Tess, a psychologist and the breadwinner, moves in with his father, Vincent, who has dementia. Tess and Joe split because she is furious with him for failing to rescue their daughter, stubborn 28-year-old Cora, from New Orleans after she refused to evacuate. Their other child, Del, returns home after having suddenly lost her job in New York to find Cora in a near-catatonic' state. Cora, who has a history of mental illness, went through an experience during the storm that left her traumatized. After Del discovers a body in a house where Cora weathered part of Katrina, Del and Cora become increasingly convinced that Cora may be responsible. As the sisters try to figure out who committed the crime, Babst skillfully makes the reader feel Dels desperate fears about Cora and the sisters' frustrations with their elders. She's also adept at pitting Tess's pushy nature against Joe's more passive tendencies. Despite a discordant ending, this is a riveting novel about the inescapable pull of family. (Oct.)

Caption: C. Morgan Babst's debut explores one New Orleans family's roiling tensions that are heightened by Hurricane Katrina (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Floating World." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA501717074&it=r&asid=87a9dd721e5e444a7897ca04742250a8. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717074

"Babst, C. Morgan: THE FLOATING WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA500364945&asid=c5a621e7e986ace6261170efba98fb92. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "The Floating World." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA509161555&asid=343cf44e29036243b4074867af522718. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. "The Floating World." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA501717074&asid=87a9dd721e5e444a7897ca04742250a8. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21920-c-morgan-babst-floating-world#.WfsFnbpFxis
  Word count: 346

  November 2017
  The Floating World
  A family in the wreckage
  BookPage review by Kenneth Champeon

  A new novel about Hurricane Katrina could seem like retreading ancient history. That was before Hurricane Harvey made an ocean of southeast Texas and harassed Louisiana. Before Irma smashed into the Caribbean and Florida, and Maria into Puerto Rico. All made landfall close to the 12th anniversary of Katrina, which left wounds that are still raw.
  C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel draws its title from a Japanese phrase signifying ephemerality, but it doubles as a description of New Orleans after Katrina. As a fictional retelling thereof, the book has few superiors. In Babst’s phrase, Katrina was a “hate crime of municipal proportion,” referring to the racial disparity in the storm’s victims.
  Reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, The Floating World is also a meditation on kinship and family history. Like Franzen’s chaotic family, the one here is ambivalent toward their hometown. Before Katrina, the protagonist, Del, escaped to New York. After Katrina, the family patriarch sinks into assisted living. Their relations with each other and the world are stormy. One of them might have committed a murder.
  The Deep South can seem fatalistic at the best of times, but the hurricane dragged this to new depths. Babst evokes Katrina’s symbology, like the Xs marking houses containing the deceased. She also revisits discussions about whether NOLA has a future in light of rising seas, to what extent the city’s devil-may-care ethos contributed to its destruction, and how the media fed off the Big Easy’s pain.
  The author resists the temptation to turn her novel into a tract or advocacy—not that it lacks passion. To the contrary, the novel is very much of our irritable, harried times.
  Like Harvey, Katrina was not just a storm but also a reconfiguration of a community. Babst’s novel is an invaluable record of that social devastation—and a warning of the devastations like Harvey to come.

• Paste
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/10/the-floating-world-c-morgan-babst.html
  Word count: 684

  In The Floating World, C. Morgan Babst Attempts to Write the Novel on Hurricane Katrina
  By Lucas Iberico Lozada  |  October 24, 2017  |  4:25pm
  Books Reviews c. morgan babst
  Share Tweet Submit Pin

  In The Floating World, C. Morgan Babst’s ambitious debut novel, the past is a spiky thicket; untangling it, setting it right again, is the task that the writer has set for her characters and herself. The novel, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on the city of New Orleans, follows the Boisdoré-Eshlemen family as they seek to put their lives back together again.
  Each of The Floating World’s characters is wracked with some internal agony. Adelaide—Del, as she is known to her family and friends—is the accomplished older daughter of the Boisdoré clan who abandons her friends and her job in New York City in order to move back home and help her family deal with the hurricane’s aftermath, though it’s not clear that anyone actually wants her help. Cora, Del’s younger sister, refuses to evacuate the city and rides out the storm with a co-worker, Troy, a decision that destabilizes her already-fragile psychological state. Tess, their mother, is a white psychiatrist who hails from an upper-class background. She and Joe, their father—a sculptor who hails from a long line of black craftsmen and artisans—split up after evacuating the city and leaving Cora behind. Meanwhile, Vincent, Joe’s father, is falling into the dementia and paranoia of the Lewy Body degenerative brain condition.
  In The Floating World, the storm works as a catalyst, a trigger for the Boisdoré clan’s deep-rooted traumas. Tess and Joe’s separation causes Joe to reflect on the inequalities baked into the origins of their relationship and Tess on her tendency to put everyone else first; Del’s return unleashes a torrent of angst about her role in the family line; Cora’s mental illness, controlled and tucked away for years, re-emerges with a vengeance.
  There are moments of great beauty and power in the book. Babst succeeds in tracing New Orlean’s social and racial divisions to their root, providing withering commentary on a murderously oblivious white upper-class that still uses words like “octoroon” in polite society. She is also a particularly dexterous writer, weaving from past to present in the course of a single paragraph or sentence without losing steam or distracting the reader. The density of the book’s prose works to mirror in her characters’ tangled thoughts the devastated physical world of New Orleans after the storm; the house Cora and Del grew up in—part of Tess’ inheritance—is considered to be on high ground, yet it too floods. Everywhere the characters turn, what the characters once took for granted is turned upside down, rent apart by hundred-mile-per-hour winds.
  Yet there is an unfortunate side effect of treating the storm as an enormous metaphor. In granting the storm such symbolic weight, Babst tends to ignore the enormous material cost the storm—aided and accelerated by human interference and negligence—wrought on the lives of New Orleanians, particularly its black residents. The book contains only glancing references to the horrors that descended upon the city after the levees broke, when police, national guardsmen and white vigilantes killed and threatened untold numbers of residents under emergency powers declared by then-Governor Kathleen Blanco and President George W. Bush; nor does it consider the plight of the tens of thousands of refugees crammed and forgotten in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. These omissions are jarring, especially given the sheer heft of the novel, its love for the smallest detail.
  It’s almost as though Babst, realizing the storm was too large to adequately represent in a single novel, decided to turn the storm into the overwrought backdrop upon which she could set a series of smaller, more manageable tragedies. For the purposes of The Floating World, the real storm may as well have never happened at all.

• Bookreporter
  https://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/the-floating-world-0
  Word count: 702

  The Floating World
  by C. Morgan Babst

  We recently passed the 12-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the massive storm that permanently altered the geography and economy of New Orleans back in 2005. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that for most of the country, Katrina is now just a distant memory of a terrible disaster, something to remember once a year when that anniversary comes around again. But for the people who lived in New Orleans --- those who evacuated and never returned, those who rebuilt, and those who have come there since --- it’s clear that Katrina is never far from their minds.
  C. Morgan Babst, who lived in New Orleans and evacuated just a day before Katrina made landfall, recently returned to her beloved city after several years living in New York. This debut novelist may feel a sort of sympathy or even kinship with one of her characters in THE FLOATING WORLD, Del, who, at the novel’s opening, is returning to her native New Orleans after living for several years in New York. In Del’s timeline, Katrina happened weeks --- not years --- earlier, and she’s fleeing both a dead-end job and an awkward romantic relationship, heading back to a home that she longs for but that may not exist anymore.
  "One of the things that’s easy to forget about huge natural disasters --- especially if you’re hundreds or thousands of miles away --- is the human scale of these incredible acts of nature. That’s what Babst captures so poignantly in her debut novel..."
  Precipitating Del’s return is the near-silence of her older sister, Cora, who refused to evacuate New Orleans with her parents as Katrina bore down on the city. Instead, she stayed behind with her boyfriend --- and, as Del soon discovers, either witnessed or precipitated a horrible act of violence while she waited for the floodwaters to recede. Cora, who has a history of depression, is nearly catatonic, and her mother, Tess, a psychiatrist, feels powerless to help her.
  Tess and her husband, Joe, are also facing a crisis prompted --- or deepened --- by Katrina. Tess, who’s white, resents Joe, who’s black, for what she views as weakness, his willingness to be turned away by authorities rather than insisting on storming back into the city to rescue Cora in the storm’s immediate aftermath. Instead, Joe --- who’s also coping with the rapid mental decline and advancing dementia of his father --- turned around and waited for Cora to reemerge on her own.
  One of the things that’s easy to forget about huge natural disasters --- especially if you’re hundreds or thousands of miles away --- is the human scale of these incredible acts of nature. That’s what Babst captures so poignantly in her debut novel, as she illustrates the fissures in the Boisdoré family, tiny cracks that Katrina magnifies into huge rifts and crevices. Other themes run through the book as well --- issues of mental illness and competence, as well as the power and limitations of art (Joe and his father are both artists, the elder Boisdoré one of the preeminent cabinetmakers of his generation, and the novel’s title is a homage to Japanese art, particularly the iconic work of Hokusai).
  But resurfacing again and again here, perhaps unsurprisingly but no less poignantly for that, are images and meditations on the idea of “home”: “As soon as you left, the rope was cut, the boats burned, and time rushed in like a river in flood. Home was a place beyond the rain and the long night. There was no way back. Not unless you were willing to swim, and from what she’d heard, the current was strong, the waves high and crested with fire, salty as tears.” Some characters in THE FLOATING WORLD work hard to come back home, others forge a new path entirely, but it’s clear that none of them will be able to return to precisely the place they fled before or after Katrina.
  Reviewed by Norah Piehl on October 27, 2017

Word Count