For the past decade, Ladette Randolph has illuminated aspects of the human condition in Nebraskan spaces — stoicism in the face of loss, the embrace of hard physical labor, faith as a source of both comfort and subjugation. The women in her narratives suppress their individuality, believing that they exist to support the agendas of husband, family, church, and community. In Randolph’s latest offering, Private Way, Nebraska once again serves as the backdrop, but Randolph reworks her familiar themes with a breezier, more optimistic touch.

Tucked into this novel about a young entrepreneur is an appreciation of Willa Cather, Nebraska’s favorite literary daughter. Unacquainted with Cather, I always thought of her novels as part of the literary spinach consumed in high school. Newcomers to Cather will be surprised to learn that her voice, long associated with the prairie grass and pioneers of My Antonia, extends far beyond the Great Plains. Nearly a century later, she remains insightful about ambition, sacrifice, and the persistent tug of home — all of which are confronted by Vivi Marx, the millennial narrator of Private Way.

Vivi is the creator of a successful social media platform built around all things pie: recipe sharing, storytelling and “pie actions,” in which the legislative process is disrupted by deliveries of homemade pies. Vivi envisions pie “as a social and cultural phenomenon, a ubiquitous domestic product reconsidered as a subversive agent for change.” Things blow up when a conservative shock jock blasts the platform’s activism. Trolls soon invade, hacking Vivi’s bank accounts and sending vile messages and death threats.

Abandoning her cell phone and laptop, Vivi flees Southern California for a year of self-imposed exile in Lincoln, Nebraska. There she finds refuge in a rented gardener’s cottage tucked away in a private residential enclave. Just as the entrance to Fieldcrest Drive is shrouded by overgrown trees, the surface charm of this hidden meadow in the city conceals secrets and expectations.

The residents of Fieldcrest Drive are quite a crew. Vivi’s landlord, the absent-minded Tillie, and her partner, the terse, motorcycle-riding Mary Garth, live in ramshackle Fieldcrest Manor with their five kids: two high school seniors, Harmony and Moss, and three little ones, Lake, Kettle, and Spur. Another neighbor, Audra, lives alone in a mid-century modern and makes daily treks to the nursing home where her husband, Jim, is dying of ALS. And there are the Clarks: gun-loving Chuck, largely absent but controlling when he’s home, and his bikini-clad wife, Bridget, who are raising two teenagers, Roger and Sophie, in their McMansion.

Neighborly entanglements are not part of Vivi’s plan. She wants solitude. She wants to find the “thread of her life.” Finding that thread is a slow process. Vivi marks time by creeksitting, walking, biking, and driving; she crisscrosses the state visiting museums, rodeos, and fairs. She befriends a dog, works part-time at a coffee shop, and accepts the calming presence of the gardener who lived and died in the cottage. She even becomes caught up in the rhythms and traditions of Fieldcrest Drive.

When Vivi discovers the cache of Willa Cather’s novels in the cottage, these books become the filter through which she sees the world. Through this device, Randolph, who is editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and distinguished publisher-in-residence at Emerson College, transforms Vivi into her professorial avatar, quoting lyrical passages and analyzing scenes from Cather’s novels that shed light on Vivi’s predicaments and those of her neighbors. When, for example, Vivi realizes that nineteen-year-old Moss may be having an affair with Bridget, she fearfully conjures a scene from O Pioneers! in which Carl Linstrum shoots and kills his wife and her lover as they hug beneath a mulberry tree. Ultimately, Randolph takes us on a field trip to Red Cloud, Cather’s childhood home, where the reader becomes a literary tourist, rubbing elbows with Cather devotees, learning the origins of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours, and revisiting the scathing criticisms she received from Ernest Hemingway and others, criticisms that stemmed more from sexism and ageism than any deficiency in her work. The novel’s quiet drama and pleasing prose conceal how cleverly Randolph sneaks in Cather’s images and sentences, infusing the literary spinach into the modern narrative sauce.

Randolph raises a vexing question: How is it that domestic spaces and community are both necessary for and detrimental to success? As the child of a house-flipping mother who disdained “crap-dragging,” Vivi has lived a vagabond’s life; the houses of her childhood were never homes but construction sites. Vivi emerged from this bleakness devoid of family mementos apart from her grandmother’s rolling pin and pie tins, the tools for her eventual business. The pie-making things languish for most of her year of isolation. But when she needs to bridge her distance from her neighbors, Vivi takes them out again and returns to baking pies — an old-fashioned lemon meringue, a Mexican chocolate pie with a hint of red pepper and cinnamon and a hazelnut crust, and a peach pie with a lattice crust.

In Shadows on the Rock, a novel set in seventeenth-century Quebec, Cather captures something of what Vivi discovers in Nebraska: “These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes were tools; and with them one made not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days, the complexion, the special flavor, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life.” But I’m more inclined to find an echo of Vivi’s experience in an essay on Katherine Mansfield in which Cather reflects that “human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away.”

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