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Generations of Exiles Collide in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Suppose that we live in a universe without “ifs.” What appears to be chance, or choice, is actually a peek into the rules of a completely separate universe that we can never access. Here, all our hopes for what might have been or what could be are accounted for; every outcome is settled, and we must play it as it lays.

Welcome to the vertigo-inducing contemporary cosmic landscape, which is also the landscape of Michael Zapata’s debut novel, “The Lost Book of Adana Moreau.” Structurally, the book alternates between the story of Maxwell Moreau, a budding theoretical physicist in 1920s-30s New Orleans, and that of Saul Drower, a hotel clerk and sci-fi enthusiast in Chicago in the early 2000s. The reader hopes these worlds will collide through an unfinished manuscript by Maxwell’s mother, the titular Adana.

The daughter of Dominican insurgents executed by the United States Marines in 1916, a teenage Adana flees the island with the help of a lovestruck pirate (Maxwell’s father), on a ship bound for Louisiana.

Settled with her new family in New Orleans, Adana discovers, like fortunate parents the world over, that literature is the best tether for her son’s wandering spirit. But it tethers her as well, and she attacks the library’s science fiction section with an autodidact’s frenzy. These titles inspire Adana to give voice to her trauma in the form of an apocalyptic novel of her own, a multiverse dramatization called “Lost City.” Tragically, typhoid strikes before she can finish the sequel, “A Model Earth,” and she destroys her only manuscript before she dies.

Yet somehow a copy finds its way to Saul’s doorstep generations later. Mourning the death of his grandfather, Saul is surprised to find this 924-page inquiry into the cosmos among his relative’s effects. Saul and his friend Javier, a journalist covering Latin America, eventually locate the manuscript’s intended recipient, a Dr. Maxwell Moreau, in New Orleans. Relying on Javier’s fluency in disaster, they drive south into the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

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The metaphor of parallel universes pervades the novel from the epigraph to the final line (in which human breath is seen as “tiny bubbles which expanded and split or collided into yet others, each single sphere translucent and aflame with the light of the dawning sun”). This poses a compositional constraint: Instead of using a story-within-a-story framework (think Nicole Krauss’s “The History of Love”), or an entangled symmetry (David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”), Zapata layers his worlds flat atop one another. The reader has to hunt for traces of communication between story lines, just as Maxwell peers from a telescope in the Chilean desert hoping to “detect gravity from one universe leaking into ours.”

Zapata builds two fully realized worlds, stretching from the Bolshevik Revolution and Prohibition-era racism to student protests in Chile, San Salvador in 1989 and the 2001 Argentine depression. He intersperses all this with stories from a mad old pirate, a former circus strongman and, by my count, 28 imaginary books. To cover so much ground, Zapata often summarizes plot for pages. “A Model Earth” might not be lost, but it’s easy to get lost in the quest to recover it.

Interestingly, Saul’s grandfather, a historian in the mode of Svetlana Alexievich, highlights the primacy of interiority over action. “Your grandfather’s history books present portraits of people rather than accounts of events, said Javier. What do people think? What makes them happy? What do they fear?”

When Zapata, too, favors people over events, their stories come alive. We feel soot on our faces when a Welsh doctor recounts leading a pony from a coal mine; we hear the clanging pots of rioters in Javier’s description of Buenos Aires. In the book’s most hypnotizing passage, we are breathless and stung by the anti-Semitic horror Saul’s great-grandfather experienced aboard a ship carrying him from Europe to the New World.

Though Maxwell’s physics is deliberately vague, the implications are immediate and real. Through the allegory of the multiverse, Zapata reinterprets the extent and toll of exile on Earth, the gulf between universes of human experience.

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