Small World
On his last train, on his last day of work, a retiring Amtrak engineer slams the brakes of his train and jumbles the lives of his passengers together. Dazed, he has the heart to realize that the humans he sent hurtling through the air were more than just names on a manifest, and he wonders “what circumstances, what decisions, had delivered them to that moment.”
This wide-ranging book then darts back and forth in time, from the mid-19th century to the early 21st. With at least 15 named point-of-view characters, the story follows four 19th-century families and their distant descendants, those soon-to-be train riders. A Chinese immigrant faces down a white man who has murdered his friends and stolen their gold in the California gold rush; a pair of Irish immigrant twins struggle to survive in a world as harsh as the one they left; a man determined to escape slavery finds what may be only a temporary respite; and a young Miwok woman decides to escape her stultifying adopted Christian family and find her own life.
Meanwhile, in the contemporary sections, we find a business woman ground down by her high-powered job (of firing people, including Amtrak employees), a woman escaping domestic abuse, a young mother with high hopes for her sweet, basketballer son, and that engineer himself. (Even that list of characters doesn’t capture everyone in this sweeping novel.)
Each storyline is rendered with respect and often beauty, though this reader found the broad scope to be, well, limiting. The characters’ realizations sometimes feel forced, and their personal journeys either truncated or rushed. Still, the final scene is deeply touching, as one character concludes that the incessant restlessness that drove everyone “collectively forward like a runaway train, that was America.”
