Village People

With Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein offers a thought-provoking tale about the pervasive influence of storytelling on apparently objective history. This intricate book features an unnamed cast in an unnamed location contending with a looming threat —“an awareness of catastrophe just beyond the garden gate”— that also goes unnamed. The effect is less a perplexing lack of specificity, more a productive abundance of obscurity.

As the novel begins, a thirtysomething woman travels to a “sparsely inhabited town” in a “remote northern country” to house-sit for her brother, a businessman whose recent divorce has allowed him to travel and pursue “the successful selling and trading, importing and exporting, of a variety of goods and services, the specifics of which to this day remain a mystery to me.” Inspired by the pastoral setting, the introspective woman, who works remotely...