Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Why is strapping, impulsive Jack Burdette, legendary bad boy and ex-football hero, promptly thrown into jail when he returns to Holt, Colo., after eight years on the run? The reader discovers the answer halfway through this deeply affecting novel. Earlier, we learn how Jack has abandoned his pregnant wife, two small sons, a girlfriend and piles of unpaid shopping-spree charges, but his sins against the town prove to be even more serious. The story is narrated by the editor-publisher of Holt's weekly newspaper; he is transformed from rueful, detached observer to tragic participant in the events, which inexorably unfold to a stunning climax. Haruf captures small-town people with a sharp humor and sympathy worthy of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology . Not a word is wasted in his brooding drama, which conceals a tender love story in its bruised heart. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Setting dominates Haruf's brief, unhappy novel of stilted lives and desperate actions. Holt is a small wheat-farming community in rural Colorado, its people passive observers of life as if living it were for others. The flat, dusty land that surrounds the town engulfs it in a prison of calm. Narrator Pat Arbuckle, editor of the local newspaper, records the action but is himself unable to act. His counterpart, Jack Burdette, is pure motion. A former local football hero long used to being observed and having his way, he operates on instinct and nearly destroys the town, which is no match for his cunning and brute force. This is an effective second novel from the author of The Tie That Binds. Recommended.-- Joseph Levandoski, Free Lib. of Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A bad apple poses a problem for the community in this small-town drama (and second novel); Haruf has pared away the folksiness of The Tie that Binds (1984) to produce a taut, though ultimately unsatisfying, work. Holt, Colorado, had never seen a football player like Jack Burdette, who brought his hometown glory when he took his high school all the way to the state championship; the town reveled in its local legend, as did his sweetheart Wanda Jo, who did all his homework, and later his laundry, waiting patiently for marriage and ignoring, along with the town, such warning signals as Jack's expulsion from college for petty theft. (This is being narrated by Jack's contemporary, Pat Arbuckle, who will succeed his father as owner/editor of the Holt Mercury.) Time passes, Wanda Jo waits and waits, and in 1971 Jack, by now 30 and manager of the grain elevator, returns from an out-of-state convention with a bride, Jessie, ten years his junior. The news just about destroys Wanda Jo, but the town doesn't turn against Jack until five years later, when he disappears with $150,000 embezzled from the elevator company; for a while it's ""open season"" on the quiet, too-independent Jessie (left behind with the two kids). Jack saves his greatest act of chutzpah, though, for another eight years, by which time the statute of limitations has run out: he returns to Holt, abducts Jessie (by now Pat's lover) and the kids at gunpoint, and disappears for a second time. Line by line, Haruf writes very well, and does a beautiful job of capturing small-town life, but (the big letdown) he has allowed a flurry of years and incidents (including four violent accidental deaths) to substitute for the drama of vigilante justice toward which the story had been building. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
