STEPS TO NOWHERE

A patriarch’s death causes a reckoning for his troubled children in Lipinski’s debut literary novel.

Dawn Udell is back in her hometown of Tulsa to attend the funeral of her semiestranged father, a prominent local pastor. A struggling LA screenwriter, she happens to be in the middle of writing a television pilot about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—an event to which her White family has a murky connection. Tension with her father over an interracial crush in high school is what sent her west in the first place. Now, her father’s death reunites her with her two siblings whose lives are no simpler for having remained in town. Her sister, Sheila, is a hospice worker who has become reliant on pills. She’s also been carrying on an affair with the married son of one of her dying patients. Her brother, Andrew, followed their father to the pulpit…and also into infidelity. His marriage is on the rocks since his wife discovered his most recent affair, and he’s unsure how to repair his image in the eyes of the gossips in his congregation. To distract himself, Andrew has been researching his great aunt Kitty Harrison, a 1930s communist and labor activist. The story is told by each of the four in turn, Kitty included, in flashbacks—revealing how each of them is haunted in different ways. “You don’t know what it’s like being stuck here, ghosts all around you,” Sheila says to Dawn at one point. “Of course, I know what it’s like,” she responds. “That’s why I left.” Can this funeral serve to exorcise the ghosts not only of the siblings’ childhood, but of their family’s sins going back to the dark beginnings of Tulsa’s racial history? It’s a tall order, but it may be the only way to survive the weekend.

Lipinski’s prose is smooth and surprising, insightfully probing uncomfortable images and emotions: “It was startling how much his face resembled a finely sculpted wax effigy more than the father she’d seen last about two years ago at Christmas….This was what death looked like. Flesh left behind, like a tree cut down. She took a deep breath, relieved to find the room smelled antiseptic and clean.” The siblings are compellingly messy. Each starts out truly unlikable and slowly wins the reader over (mostly) as the origins of their dysfunctions are revealed. The dysfunction carries over into the larger portrait of Tulsa—a city that Lipinski summons with unexpected vibrancy—and its fraught history. Dawn expresses some ambivalence about whether or not the Tulsa Race Massacre is a story she should be telling, and it’s clear the author has considered such topics as well. To the extent that the book is about racism, it is about White people attempting to grapple with racism within their own families—as well as a host of other unsavory tendencies that seem to spill over from one generation to another. The novel succeeds in dramatizing the attempt, at least, and does so with a cast of flawed and vivid characters.

An ambitious novel about the possibility of redemption within families.