Zorrie
Zorrie Underwood lives and loves, marries and mourns, farms and fends for herself in Depression-era and 1950s Indiana. After deaths in her family, Zorrie sets out to find work, walking or hitching rides from Hillsburg, Indiana, to Franklin, Jefferson, and Morocco, where she trades menial labor for meals. In Ottawa, Illinois, she gets a steady job at the Radium Dial Co., where she paints numbers on clock faces with luminous paint and makes life-long friendships with Marie and Janie. After returning to Hillsburg, she weds and later loses Harold in an air crash in WWII. Zorrie inherits and successfully runs the Underwood farm, providing plenty of produce, ham, and canned fruits and vegetables for herself, neighbors, and town folk.
Author Hunt is a professor of literary arts at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and author of several novels and short-story collections. The Kind One won the Anisfield-Wolf and PEN/Faulkner Awards. Neverhome received the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine.
Zorrie captures the small events and moments that populate the memory—letting grains of sand from the Indiana Dunes fall through the fingers, for instance—and help one climb out of some of life’s hurts. It appreciates subtle, sensitive connections, as with Zorrie’s dog, Oates, grounding her neighbor Virgil, calming his dementia-induced meanderings. Understated and lyrical, the novel is touching and wistful.
