The Brooklyn Rail

If the marketing copy for Portia Elan’s Homebound seems opaque, it’s because even the briefest plot summary risks spoilers, and part of the pleasure of this book lies in the way its storylines come together.

Here’s a plot summary that attempts to skirt spoiler territory: In 1983, Becks’s uncle has just died in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, leaving her a stack of floppy disks full of a game he never finished designing. For Becks—increasingly distant from her best friend while she figures out her queer identity—the incomplete game is a point of connection to someone who sees her, even though she doesn’t yet have the skills to finish it. In 2586, Yesiko, captain of the Babylon, takes on three new passengers who she thinks can help her pay off a debt and fund a cure for Root, her crewmate and surrogate uncle, who is slowly dying. In the late 2070s, scientist Tamar Portman writes emails to an old grad school friend about the ethical quandaries of developing robots meant to help humans survive on other planets. Interstitial chapters feature an astronaut, California Solo, and Elijah, who tries to save her.

I have to admit to some cynicism about books with multiple storylines. I’ve read enough of them in recent years that the connections often seem obvious, or I find myself enjoying one timeline significantly more than the other and am impatient for the less compelling storyline to end. Homebound is the rare book to break through my multiple-timeline fatigue. While I began the book most attached to Becks because her world felt the most familiar, I soon felt equally invested in the others: Yesiko and Root on their ship in 2586; Tamar in 2078 and the choices she needs to make about where her discoveries can best be of use; Solo and whether she’ll fulfill her mission; and Chaya, Yesiko’s robot passenger who has lived the longest out of all the characters and struggles the most with loneliness and confusion about their purpose.

The relationships in Homebound are mostly found-family ones. Becks receives quiet support and acknowledgement from her boss at the record store, Yesiko would do anything to save Root, and Yesiko’s relationships with her passengers, including Chaya, slowly thaw. Intergenerational connection in Homebound isn’t a matter of blood but is built in other ways, particularly through storytelling and ritual. Root’s practice of “storying” leaves Yesiko with tales that she can return to for instruction and pass on, even when she isn’t sure of the stories’ intended lessons. Plumbing elders’ stories for meaning becomes a way of staying in touch with those elders and, for Chaya, with past versions of themself.

Root has also taught Yesiko Jewish traditions and prayers, which she recites on occasions when she knows Root would have said them—again without always knowing what the prayers mean. She builds on these ancient rituals with additions specific to her time, such as adding a jar of dirt from the island where she was born, “an island long since drowned,” to her Seder plate. Chaya, too, has learned Jewish prayers on their travels, and when they’re able to join Yesiko in reciting them, individual voices become “a chorus,” even on lonely ships at sea, even when the words aren’t fully understood.

Homebound makes an argument for presence. “Afloat in a churning, unpredictable ocean,” Yesiko thinks at one point, “the only true bulwark against destruction was attention. Attention to the boat, to the sea. Attention to the storying.” Yesiko chooses not to leave her passengers to the dangers of the north, even when doing so might give her the chance to save Root. The same values animate the story’s other timelines. Though Tamar works for a company that is selling egregiously expensive spots on “ark-ships” that boast of being “humanity’s best hope of a future” elsewhere, she remains focused on Earth and what she can do to preserve the planet we already have. California Solo helps the people she meets by staying with them, and asking questions until they’re willing to face difficult conversations they need to have.

Each of these characters lives in the midst or the aftermath of grief and climate change, and many of them struggle with loneliness or alienation. The work they do to build or preserve community takes anywhere from weeks to years, sometimes not coming to fruition until after the end of their lifetimes. Still, they all make the choice to stay put—or, when forced to leave, to bring the past with them. Homebound approaches the scale of the characters’ work with optimism, rather than impatience or despair, and rewards the reader with small glimpses of how that work reverberates across generations. In a moment when I often find myself reading for escape—reading, in essence, to leave this reality for a little while—Homebound made me want to stay, too.