Andrew Krivak discusses his new novel, Like the Appearance of Horses.

Like the Appearance of Horses is the freestanding culmination of my three novels set in the fictional town of Dardan, Pennsylvania. It takes up the lives of characters from two blended families, showing how they’ve been shaped by war in the 20th century, as each generation struggles with its own sense of love and loss, duty and morality, honor and shame. The title is taken from a line in the prophet Joel, who is describing a plague of locusts: “Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses, so they run.”

The novel begins in 1933, when Jozef Vinich—who has left the old country and created a life for himself, his wife, and his daughter in the Pennsylvania mountains—is surprised by the arrival of the half-Romani child he saved during WWI. Jozef welcomes Becks, treats him like a son, and teaches him the ways of his family and the land. Eventually Becks and Jozef’s daughter, Hannah, fall in love and marry, and have their two sons Bo and Sam. But when WWII takes Becks back to Europe as an American serviceman and, later, his son Sam to Vietnam, the wages of war come back to the family.

To put it as succinctly as possible, Like the Appearance of Horses is a novel about generations of one family that have been shaped by the many wars we have seen in the long martial arc of the 20th century, and how each generation—women and men both, at home and abroad—responds, in its own way and in its own time, to the calls and struggles of those wars that have shaped us as a nation.

In the twenty years I’ve been writing fiction, one of the things I’ve fallen in love with and that has driven me to create a multi-generational history of one family has been the challenge and the joy of fleshing out a multitude of characters. This novel has the largest palette of characters I’ve ever worked with as a writer. Not only will you encounter Jozef Vinich, his daughter Hannah, and her sons Bo and Sam, but also Jozef’s wife Helen, his cousin Frances, who is modeled after my own great aunt, Burne Grayson, who served with Sam in Vietnam, and my favorite, Father Tomáš Rovnávaha, as well as many other characters who come and go along the way. Each one is a crucial piece of the family’s puzzle. Each one is like a teacher who appears when a main character is in need of that teacher the most. And in case readers need help remembering who is who, there’s a full genealogy in the back of the book.

Like the Appearance of Horses owes its life, as my previous novels do, to the stories my grandmother told me as a boy growing up in Pennsylvania about what is now Slovakia, and what being an Eastern European immigrant was like in this country between the world wars. When I used to sit and listen to my grandmother tell us stories, I became fascinated by the realization that stories rarely move in a linear arc, especially when the storytelling is not a one-time event but rather a ritual one returns to week after week, year after year.

Storytellers don’t always get the stories straight and in full the first time around, detail by orderly detail. For this reason, the novel doesn’t progress in a linear fashion. Rather, it moves back and forth in time, taking up the stories of different characters and their connections in a way that allows for the surprise of revelation. Because that’s how stories move when they’re told to us, that’s often how our memories of events move when they become the basis of stories, and that’s how time works when it’s inhabited by a character in the process of becoming: like the appearance of horses on a plain, not there one minute, there the next, then gone again.

I hope that readers will find Like the Appearance of Horses a vast, challenging, mournful, and ultimately triumphant novel. In a word, I hope they’ll find it beautiful, from beginning to end, and in every revealing appearance of what it means to live and love and sacrifice along the way.