Recommended for fans of Magical Realism, Classical Epic, and Metaphorical Fantasy
A praying man in the desert. He exists, for a moment, outside an all-encompassing system that has eroded creativity, dreams, and freedom. His story shifts across time and space, becoming an elusive reality the characters struggle to grasp.
Jack Gist’s The Yewberry Way is ambitious, unique, and speaks to a wealth of ideas.
It is also not an easy story to summarise. In many ways, it is much more interested in characters, themes, and ideas than its slowly developing, symbolic narrative. It explores the changing reality of a story told, retold, and eventually remembered, reduced to the single embodiment of the praying man standing as a bulwark against a world that has forgotten its past.
Much of the plot follows the main character’s internal Odyssey as he struggles to remember his own identity against the voices that infiltrate his mind. Present and past are interwoven in an intergenerational tale of life under a mysterious, oppressive system that is inspired by contemporary American life. The author, Jack Gist, gives us glimpses of the characters’ lives in a way that is, at times, reminiscent of John Steinbeck and at others remains poetically esoteric in a homage to the likes of Samuel Beckett.
The moments when the book explores the quiet tragedy of characters living under the weight of the system were my personal favourites. Gist provides some great character work in those sections when we see different people trying to adjust to the oppression of the book’s mysterious, all-encompassing system of government.
The central premise of the story becomes clear around the 100-page mark. While the earlier stories and character explorations are well-written and conceptualised, the slow and esoteric start is challenging to follow and takes a while to pay off. There are also some unnecessary repetitions in the writing style that slow down the pacing and do not fit with the symbolic minimalism Gist otherwise gravitates towards.
The Yewberry Way is a deeply metaphorical and challenging read, intending to provoke both an intellectual and emotional contemplation of systems of oppression, and of identity, memory, and love; and even that does not yet scratch the surface of Gist’s multi-faceted preoccupations. By far the closest parallel in terms of other works of literature I can think of would be the novels of Wilson Harris.
Like Harris, Gist draws on different facets of world mythology, referencing folk tales from across the world alongside works by Homer and Reiner Maria Rilke, whereby he creates a transcultural tapestry of mythology aiming at universal significance. What I prefer in other works of the same tone and ambition, however, is a clearer and deeper thematic focus. Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, for instance, is concerned with cyclical systems of oppression. His characters repeating the same journey over and over, even after their own death, is thereby emblematic of the need to relive the past to find a more enlightened perspective on the present.
Gist’s Yewberry Way does not have the same clearly defined focus. The difficulty of finding your own identity within a system that can erode your memories; the importance of maintaining a connection with the past within a world that is only interested in the present; the impact of fate and destiny on individual will; the conflict between tradition and technology – these are only some of the large-scale ideas Gist tries to tackle in his novel.
This ambition has the effect that some of his explorations remain a little surface-level. In particular, his brief exploration of the system’s impact on gender expression and gender identity read overly simplistic to me. Focusing on a tighter, more clearly defined theme would have allowed Gist to deepen his explorations and to add more clarity to those moments that read more esoteric than philosophical.
TL;DR: Overall, I would recommend this for readers of classical epic and magical realism who are curious about exploring an American-esque mysterious dystopia. The Yewberry Way is a thought-provoking read that demands your constant attention but rewards your time with poetic prose and the opportunity to contemplate some wide-ranging ideas.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book via Reedsy Discovery. I am not affiliated with the author or the publishing press.
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