‘Us Fools’ author, Nora Lange, on what the farm crisis has to say about today

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A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

In the 1980s, farmers across America faced economic ruin, shaping the way agriculture works to this day. A new novel follows two young sisters growing up on a Midwest farm during that time. It's titled "Us Fools." Here's the host of NPR's Book Of The Day podcast Andrew Limbong.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: It's 1987, and Congress is deliberating a bill about giving aid to farmers when Bernadette, our narrator, watches her sister, Jo, jump off the roof of a barn. Here's author Nora Lange reading from her novel, "Us Fools."

NORA LANGE: (Reading) I was 9 going on 10, and she was 11. I wanted to experience falling as a way to train myself, Jo had said about her ill-fated experiment jumping onto the concrete, to feel something.

LIMBONG: Bernie and Jo live on a farm in Illinois, and things are not going well. Here's President Reagan speaking in 1985.

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RONALD REAGAN: Today, we find ourselves with farmers who grow more than they can sell, and the result is low commodity prices and a depressed rural economy - and this in spite of how much we've spent.

LANGE: Family farms were borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and basically getting squeezed out.

LIMBONG: Many of them had to sell their farms altogether, breaking the fabric of American farm life. And Lange says it was small family farms that bore the brunt of this.

LANGE: Who felt pretty abandoned by both the government and the banks.

LIMBONG: The sisters in Lange's novel exist here on the edge of insolvency. But they're young girls, so while particularly Bernadette is attuned to, say, the progress of farm aid bills in Congress, the two are more than happy to watch "The Sally Jessy Raphael Show" every day. They know their dad is looking for wickedly high interest loans just to keep the farm afloat, but they'd rather spend their days debating whether or not mermaids can get yeast infections. The book is filled with these contrasting images, painting the world as sometimes bleak, sometimes absurd, which is something a lot of people can relate to, whether you live on a farm or not, says Lange.

LANGE: And I feel like this state of limbo, that, like, many people are, like, sort of asked to kind of just live in is really an impossible ask.

LIMBONG: And it's an ask that the two sisters react very differently to as the novel progresses. Since the farm is no longer the future for them, the two sisters find different identities to wear.

LANGE: I think Bernadette feels like she's the stable one and she's the predictable one and that her sister is the anarchist, if you will.

LIMBONG: Which is a tough spot, I feel like, to be the stable one. And I think she feels that pressure, right?

LANGE: Totally. You know, it's one of those things where, like, she had to choose something because she had to be different than her sister, her older sister. But you're right. The stability, she sort of despises it. I mean, it both gives her an identity, so she kind of leans into it, but she also wants to sort of light it on fire.

LIMBONG: You could read "Us Fools" as a tight-knit family drama, an historical look at the farm crisis or an exploration of how economic realities can force us to pick an identity. But more simply, Lange says, it's just a book about America.

Andrew Limbong, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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