The elements, natural and otherwise, have other plans, and Miles comes face to face with a strange man who turns out to be the ghost of a neighboring farmer, driven mad by the requirements of "proving up." The willowy figure knows all too well the cost of the American Dream, and the window soon becomes a broken mirror reflecting great tragedy. Miles mounts his gray mare with the window wrapped in burlap and gallops across the land. With their eldest son incapacitated, Ma and Pa Zegner send their youngest living child Miles on a mission to share the valuable commodity with their distant neighbors who are expecting a visit from a government inspector. They obsessively list the requirements of the Homestead Act: five years of harvest, a sod house dwelling, and perhaps the most elusive element - a glass window. A family dreams of "proving up" and obtaining the deed to the land they've settled. This is the art of a Karen Russell story. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction. Proving Up is an opera about the American Dream, told through the story of Nebraskan homesteaders in the 1870s. A sand mandala meditation on life which sinks its fangs into the vampire mythos and leaves it in a funicular. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family’s struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking.
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