Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Prize for Fiction
Set in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women—niece, aunt, and stowaway—and an improbable road trip.
Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan—with a hound in tow—set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they’ve known.
Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave’s dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived.
With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth—and herself—the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.
Genre: General Fiction
Set in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women—niece, aunt, and stowaway—and an improbable road trip.
Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan—with a hound in tow—set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they’ve known.
Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave’s dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived.
With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth—and herself—the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.
Genre: General Fiction
Praise for this book
"Call It Horses is a spectacular novel. With the gorgeous language of Jayne Anne Phillips and the compassion of Carson McCullers, Jessie van Eerden follows an unforgettable cast of women through their lives and longing in West Virginia with precision and insight. An original, beautifully structured, and deeply moving book." - Karen E Bender
"Call It Horses is so many wonderful things at once: a road novel-three women trying to outrun grief, from the limestone caves of Caudell, West Virginia to the canyons of Palo Duro, Texas; a portrait of the artist as restless skeptic; a meditation on language itself. I know of few writers who write as well as Jessie van Eerden about the sacredness of language, the way it calls forth the world by naming it. Van Eerden doesn’t just write about it; she enacts it formally-the shapeshifting magic of words, the acrobatic possibilities of sentences, the beautiful, yearning, fail and fail better lengths to which we all go to make our minds heard." - Maud Casey
"A novel of grit and grace. Jessie van Eerden, in language both lean and lush, tells this story of women on the run-women who discover that in leaving they find exactly where they’re meant to be. The final scene is one I’ll remember always." - Lee Martin
"Jessie van Eerden manages, in prose so luminous it feels backlit by the golden hour, to give familiar topics-family, history, grief-their monumental due. But as exact are its descriptions of Appalachian bog and the dusty canyons of West Texas, Call It Horses locates its mystery in the liminal. The westward journey these three women take is filled with take-out meals and cheap hotel rooms, but the novel’s most illuminating route is an unsettling and compassionate search for solace." - Michael Parker
"Call It Horses is so many wonderful things at once: a road novel-three women trying to outrun grief, from the limestone caves of Caudell, West Virginia to the canyons of Palo Duro, Texas; a portrait of the artist as restless skeptic; a meditation on language itself. I know of few writers who write as well as Jessie van Eerden about the sacredness of language, the way it calls forth the world by naming it. Van Eerden doesn’t just write about it; she enacts it formally-the shapeshifting magic of words, the acrobatic possibilities of sentences, the beautiful, yearning, fail and fail better lengths to which we all go to make our minds heard." - Maud Casey
"A novel of grit and grace. Jessie van Eerden, in language both lean and lush, tells this story of women on the run-women who discover that in leaving they find exactly where they’re meant to be. The final scene is one I’ll remember always." - Lee Martin
"Jessie van Eerden manages, in prose so luminous it feels backlit by the golden hour, to give familiar topics-family, history, grief-their monumental due. But as exact are its descriptions of Appalachian bog and the dusty canyons of West Texas, Call It Horses locates its mystery in the liminal. The westward journey these three women take is filled with take-out meals and cheap hotel rooms, but the novel’s most illuminating route is an unsettling and compassionate search for solace." - Michael Parker
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Jessie van Eerden's Call It Horses