Review by New York Times Review
REVIEWING A DEBUT novel titled "The Orchard Keeper," in 1965, the New York Times critic Orville Prescott chastened its author for nearly submerging "his own talents beneath a flood of imitation." That young author was Cormac McCarthy, and the influence whose weight Prescott saw him sagging beneath belonged to William Faulkner. Among the hand-me-down characteristics Prescott noted: "the wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents ; the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; the deliberate ambiguity, the hints and withheld information; the confusion in time and place; and the flashbacks that fail to shed much light into the intermittent gloom." All of these factors, he concluded, made for an exasperating book. "But the wonder," he pivoted, "is that in spite of them it is also an impressive book." Almost 50 years later, the branch that grew from Faulkner's trunk has sprouted its own set of offshoots. Perhaps the woodiest of these belongs to Charles Frazier, whose 1997 blockbuster, "Cold Mountain," was, as Will Blythe wrote in these pages, "the best McCarthy novel McCarthy never wrote." Anteriority marches on, as McCarthy himself once told an interviewer: "The ugly fact is, books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." Smith Henderson's debut novel, "Fourth of July Creek," is the latest of these sprigs to emerge. Of the McCarthy-ized Faulknerian tics that Prescott inventoried in '65, most are present here, though "Fourth of July Creek" more vibrantly evokes McCarthy's middle-period novels ("Suttree," in particular), as seen here in an episode involving a 15-year-old runaway: "He skulks, a black bogeyman at night in the Kalispell alleyways behind the old railroader's cottages, walking to stay warm, running from barking dogs. He sits in a coin-op laundry for as long as feels safe. Catches a southbound Kenworth. "'You got the fidgets,' logger says. "'I'm all right.' He stiffens, deepens his voice. 'M'aright.' "He walks to the rail yard in Missoula. See him dashing out after the departing train at sunset, slipping off the low rung, tumbling." See the child. See the influence. Yet the wonder here, to parrot Prescott's assessment of "The Orchard Keeper," is that "Fourth of July Creek" is also an impressive book - deeply so. McCarthy's shadow may loom heavy across the prose - darkling it, to use one of the McCarthy-esque verbs that Henderson deploys - but the story this prose conveys, and the manner in which Henderson unfurls it, bears its own unalloyed power. "Fourth of July Creek" introduces itself as tragedy; our sense from the opening scenes is that we're headed for calamity, that scars are waiting to be embossed upon the characters we meet. Chief among these characters is Pete Snow, a 31-year-old social worker who comes to us already pocked with scars, pre-distressed like high-end denim. Snow is of a type that tends toward overrepresentation in contemporary American fiction: the white male screwup. Or in Jim Harrison's pungent formulation, "another nifty guy at loose ends." His drinking gets him kicked out of bars before lunchtime. Both ends of his family life are on the skids: He's estranged from his father as well as his wife and teenage daughter. He's barely clinging to employment. Yet he's redeemed by two qualities that also hew to type: a streak of idealism that runs through him, and a vinegary self-awareness. As he tells his estranged wife, "I take kids away from people like us." The year is 1980 - the predawn to Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign, at which Henderson hints - and the setting rural Montana. Snow lives in a cabin north of Tenmile, a town unpoetically named for its distance from a 19th-century mining camp. "Tenmile's scarce illumination - neon bar signage, a few porch lights, the four streetlights flashing yellow - could not dim the stars in this plain and blank night country," Henderson writes, but that darkness isn't confined to nighttime. Henderson's Montana is a place of attack dogs, violent drunks, elk poachers, pawnbrokers hawking Nazi flags, anarchists, panty thieves and backwoods pot growers. It's a Montana that snarls at you from the page. (Remove the populace, however, and it purrs with its trademark natural splendor.) At the Ten High bar, for instance, you drank until "you toppled over, and when you stood your back glinted with pull tabs and peanut shells and people sometimes cut their hands wiping you off." Even the mildest dispensations of mercy here, it seems, come with perils. But dispensing mercy is part of Snow's job, and in some sense it's a job Henderson undertakes as well. The plot coalesces after Snow encounters an 11-year-old boy who's wandered into, for him, the unfamiliar setting of a schoolyard. This boy, Benjamin, is a feral creature, "a white boy with purple and brown bruises and dirt and pink scar tissue and all those jaundiced whorls, all of the colors so faint in the whelming whiteness of him." As Snow comes to find out, he's the son of Jeremiah Pearl, a fundamentalist recluse subsisting in the Yaak Wilderness, a feral creature himself with a beard so "blown out and thatched with bits of leaves and sticks" that "it'd be no surprise to hear chirping issue from it." Henderson teases out a portrait of Pearl via Snow's investigation, which zigs and zags with artful verve; it's Pearl's story, more than anything else, that locks this novel in your hands. From an early narrative distance Pearl appears as some kind of sinister wraith, a cousin, perhaps, to the magnificently evil Judge Holden in McCarthy's "Blood Meridian." He's a political zealot who's converted everything he owns into "bullet, gun or seed," a Holocaust denier who scorns the federal government as the "Zionist Occupational Government," a man who huffs the Book of Revelations like teenagers huff glue. "I am the kakangelist," he tells Snow. "The bringer of bad tidings." One needn't read the jacket copy to forecast the eventual arrival of A.T.F. and F.B.I. agents. What's far less predictable, however, is the way Henderson swivels - the way in which the merciful impulses of Snow and Henderson dovetail, yielding narrative complications but also emotional ones. The reviewer must tread carefully here, so as not to sabotage the assiduous peeling away that gives this novel its momentum. Suffice it to say that Henderson stuffs Pearl with enough ambiguities that empathy, not horror, provokes the greater readerly disturbance. Henderson butters his characters with great gobs of compassion; only a few characters are denied extenuating circumstances for their sins and degradations. As an authorial God, he's expressly New Testament (as opposed to the harsher Old Testament God of McCarthy, leveling cities in his brimstony wrath). If there's a punching bag here, it's the arrogance of societal strictures, which Henderson swings at by exploring the friction of the so-called greater good clashing with the individual good. As the title suggests, this is a book about freedom, and not unlike Jonathan Franzen's novel about the same subject, it seeks to map the moral limits of freedom - that border ground where one person's freedoms infringe upon another's. By juxtaposing Pearl's fathering with Snow's (a parallel story strand involving Snow's runaway 13-year-old daughter, dished out in interview form, provides a degree of antiphonal resonance), Henderson probes the ways society exerts its will upon us, and what submission, or resistance, can yield. As Jeremiah Pearl says: "A man comes to your house to give you something - a service, a good, a belief - you best set him back on his way." If that man comes offering this trenchant and vigorously empathetic novel, however - best thank him. The protagonist tells his estranged wife, 'I take kids away from people like us.' JONATHAN MILES'S latest novel, "Want Not," has just been released in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 29, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Dedicated social worker Pete Snow lives in remote, impoverished Tenmile, Montana, in part because he's hiding out from the fallout of his own fractious divorce and in part because he knows that poverty breeds dysfunctional families, and there are plenty of kids who need his care. When he is summoned to open a file on Benjamin Pearl, a nearly feral 11-year-old boy who is suffering from malnutrition, he comes into contact with the boy's father, Jeremiah, a paranoid survivalist who mints his own money and is convinced that the end-time is near. Pete soon learns that the FBI is also interested in Jeremiah, targeting him as a homegrown terrorist. Meanwhile, Pete's own family is in crisis; his teenage daughter has vanished, and his ex-wife can't do much more than drink and pray. First-novelist Henderson not only displays an uncanny sense of place he clearly knows rural Montana and its impassable roads, its dank bars, its speed freaks and gas huffers he also creates an incredibly rich cast of characters, from Pete's drunken, knuckleheaded friends to the hard-luck waitress who serves him coffee to the disturbed, love-sick survivalist. Dark, gritty, and oh so good.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This uneven debut, set in 1980 Montana, isn't always able to sustain the interest of its opening sections. The first chapter introduces us to social worker Pete Snow, who has been called by the police to defuse a domestic dispute between a 15-year-old boy, who has been in trouble with the law repeatedly, and his speed-addicted mother. The situation is grim, but Snow goes above and beyond the call of duty to place the teenager in a stable and supportive environment. His greater challenge comes with his next case: a boy who shows up on the playground of the local school dirty and reeking. The child, Benjamin Pearl, is reticent about revealing the circumstances at home, and Snow finds trying to help him difficult; Benjamin's reclusive and angry father is opposed to assistance, even making the boy strip naked rather than wear the clean clothes Snow has provided. Snow's efforts to help the Pearls despite the father's hostility are the focus of the book, which is too long and features an unsatisfying ending. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Pete Snow is a social worker in early 1980s small-town Montana whose life is nearly as troubled as those of his clients. He is separated from his wife and teenage daughter, estranged from his father and stepmother, and easing his problems with alcohol. One morning Pete receives a call regarding a strange young boy who has shown up at a local school. Benjamin Pearl is the son of Jeremiah Pearl, a reclusive survivalist who lives in the hills outside town. Pete tries to help ragged and undernourished -Benjamin but soon runs afoul of the paranoid Jeremiah. Through persistence, Pete slowly gains a degree of trust from Jeremiah and is able to provide some assistance. But when Jeremiah's activities draw the interest of the FBI, Pete is caught up in the web of suspicion. As the noose tightens, Jeremiah's dark secrets will profoundly affect Pete as well. VERDICT On a political level, -Henderson skillfully presages the contemporary political environment in his portrayal of the America of three decades ago. On a deeper level, this dark, compassionate novel finds in Jeremiah's-and Pete's-pain a mirror of everyone's. This is a significant debut. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2014. 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
Of wide open spaces and lives narrowly, desperately lived at the bitter ends of dirt and gravel roads.The spur of the Rockies at the northwestern corner of Montana is as hard and remote a stretch of country as any in the Lower 48, good reason why a person might want to disappear into it. Social worker Pete Snow, delivered to us in medias res, is well-used to what happens to people with too little money and too much booze or meth in tow. But he's not quite prepared for how years of being used to such things can wear a person downand what will touch him off to the point that he's willing to smack a client. Says Pete to his target, trying to explain the rightness of his act, "[t]hose punches sure as shit come through me but they were not mine. As meant for you as they were, they were not mine." He's willing to cop to most responsibilities, but that doesn't stop his own life from dissolving. Meanwhile, he's caught up in a curious knot: In a land of snarling dogs and WIC checks, he has to sort out the life of a very nearly feral child, bound up in the even more complex life of a survivalist, paranoid and anti-statist, who may or may not be a Unabomber in the making. That brings the feds into the picture, and if Pete resorts to fisticuffs reluctantly, the FBI thinks nothing of beating their way around a countryside that looks ever more apocalyptic with each passing page. Henderson, a native Montanan, finds ample room for deep-turning plot twists in the superficially simple matter of a man looking for meaning in his own life while trying to help others too proud and mistrustful to receive that assistance. The story goes on a bit long, but the details are just right: It's expertly written and without a false note, if often quite bleak.Of a piece with Peter Heller's The Dog Stars and Cormac McCarthy's The Road in imagining a rural West that's seen better daysand perhaps better people, too. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
