'After Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo, I knew what I would do. Feel rage, shame, disgust, loneliness, helplessness, sorrow, despair, great and debilitating hatred for everyone who did not also feel these things.' This is the heterodox and unnerving but touching narrator of Wreck and Order. Read this carnal picaresque novel for – its daring, its passages of unsparing self-interrogation, its sharp rendering of locale and lives in Sri Lanka. Not every kink in this young woman’s quest is made straight by the time you reach the end, but that’s the way you want it to be when you get there."
—Norman Rush, National Book Award winning author of Mating and Subtle Bodies
"Strong and vulnerable, wise and reckless, a young woman made happy by the right and wrong things—Elsie Shore takes self-discovery to a new level in this very smart, highly quotable novel. 'I was there to lose control, to be surprised by another person'; she is all nerve and courage, from California to Sri Lanka, with a dangerous flaw—when men hurt her she returns to the source of pain for relief from the pain. I alternately feared for and applauded the darkly funny young woman at the center of this stunning debut."—Amy Hempel
“Wreck and Order is suffused with an essential intelligence that makes even the most challenging of journeys sing.”—Rivka Galchen
"Hannah Tennant-Moore has created an unforgettable character: a deeply sensitive millennial who has internalized the culture's tendencies to objectify and degrade the female body, even as she's intellectually embattled against those very same tendencies. She's a new kind of feminist; she tallies orgasms received and given with the scrupulous attention and fury second wave feminists devoted to the counting of dishes washed, beds made and meals cooked. Her wisdom awakens in Sri Lanka, in a cross-cultural friendship she develops with a traditional young woman. A fearless, far ranging exploration of a contemporary young woman's sexuality and ambition, which covers continents, includes even a proper engagement and questions the nature of happiness and endings."—Mona Simpson
"Elsie, the protagonist of WRECK AND ORDER, is simultaneously in search of and in flight from her nature – sexually, spiritually, and emotionally. In this raw and compelling debut, Hannah Tennant-Moore has created a woman savagely at odds with herself: a heroine who’s anything but, for these strange times."—Claire Messud
"In Tennant-Moore's sharp, confident debut novel, Elsie, a bright young woman in her 20s who is equal parts self-assured and self-destructive, isn't afraid to name her feelings: "lust, rage, lust, rage"...Sophisticated and nuanced...Tennant-Moore provides no easy answers, deftly illustrating Elsie's inner monologue as she tries to face up to herself and the people around her. The book has a broad appeal, and many young women will keep it stacked on their bookshelf...and cart it with them like a talisman."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] sharp debut...With bracing insight, Tennant-Moore captures not only Elsie's inner life, but also her physical existence; the novel stands out not only for its emotional precision, but for its incredible attention to the visceral realities of having a body. Often unsettling, sometimes funny, always meticulously observed; a quietly intoxicating novel that resists easy answers."—Kirkus
2015-11-19
Tennant-Moore's sharp debut follows a defiantly self-destructive young woman—powerfully intelligent and profoundly lost—as she grapples with identity, spirituality, and purpose. Elsie, recently returned from a miserable year in Paris—her alternative to college—and now reveling in her own free fall, has a job writing obituaries for her small-town Southern California paper and an explosive relationship with an alcoholic rockabilly guitarist/drug dealer named Jared ("Here was an answer to the question of what to do with my life," she notes, bleakly). Trying to escape both Jared and her current existence, she buys a ticket to Sri Lanka. "I had known other versions of myself that allowed me to hope the situation I was in would not be my life," she explains. Sri Lanka, appealing for both its incongruity—"a tropical paradise that was also a recent war zone"—and its distance, offers a kind of desperate hope. This could be the beginning of an exhausted cliché: young, pretty American woman has transformative experience traveling through Third World country; meets local people; finds meaning and purpose. But it isn't—this is not that book. Elsie does develop meaningful connections, of course, but even her most intimate interactions are fraught, warm but complicated; upon returning home, she is not transformed. "I felt I could handle the wrong choices now, that I could live the old life in a new way," she explains: more Jared, more drifting, a fledgling French translation project, another man, another troubled relationship. And then a letter arrives that draws her back to Sri Lanka for a trip that is both deeper and more demanding than the first. With bracing insight, Tennant-Moore captures not only Elsie's inner life, but also her physical existence; the novel stands out not only for its emotional precision, but for its incredible attention to the visceral realities of having a body. Often unsettling, sometimes funny, always meticulously observed; a quietly intoxicating novel that resists easy answers.
