Krishna
A simple yet poignant story. Though the story is about a small city in Holt near Denver, Colorodo, the writing style and the simplicity of the small town life described evokes the memory of Roddy Doyle, the chronicler of South Dublin based stories. (Some of his works have been previously reviewed in this forum, for example, see the reviews of Paddy Clerk Ha Ha Ha or The Barrytown Trilogy )
here is a lot in this book that is very good. This shows a slice of small town American life, their trials, tragedies, celebrations and it does it without exaggeration and also makes it absolutely absorbing
The story is about a few families, the lives of the persons being intertwined with each other as lives of the people in small towns are wont to do. There is Tom Guthrie, who is a school teacher, and his sons Ike and Bobby. Their mother, Ella, leaves them all and goes to live with her sister in Denver.
There is Victoria Roubideax, who becomes pregnant at teenage and is thrown out by her mother in the middle of the night with nowhere to go. She decides to keep the baby, against all odds. The boy who is the biological father does not know and will not care if he did, as she feels.
The twins, Harold and Raymond McPherons are old, unmarried and set in their ways. They are unsophisticated, rough around the edges and live in a farm outside of town, and take on a tremendous responsibility for which they do not know if they are prepared. who is harassed by the schizophrenic father of the teacher when she was living with the teacher (Maggie Jones). So Victoria comes to live with them.
Maggie Jones is a school teacher who has a soft corner for Tom Guthrie, but is struggling to cope with a senile father who stays with her.
Tom Guthrie in Holt has two boys and a wife. The wife stays in her room and sleeps a lot. He has two boys Ike and Bobby. We have very touching scenes where they look up to the ceiling because their mother is in the room and refuses to come out.
Bobby and Ike meanwhile distribute newspapers and have a difficult time collecting the money – a barber accusing them of ‘cutting their hair elsewhere’ and an old woman boring them to death with talk before paying them and so on. We learn that their mother left the family. Really touching scenes. They watch as a bunch of college kids come in the night to an abandoned house. They watch a boy have sex with a girl and request that the girl put out to a friend. She hates it but obeys because she loves her ‘boyfriend’. The other boy comes and she submits to sex as a favour to her boyfriend, behaves as if she is not even there and drives him away right after. The boys are dumbfounded, peeking from outside through blinds.
The boys go with their father who is herding cattle and seeing if any of them have calves inside and also to de-horn cows with broken horns. The father and the farmer brothers gossip about a vet who was caught fornicating with a customer sometime ago.
And then there is the Beckman boy who is trouble in class and wants to take revenge on Tom Guthrie for perceived unfair targeting of him in class. Despite Principal’s request to do so, Tom will not relax his standards and treat this or any boy differently.
The Beckman boy who assaulted Guthrie is disciplined with a suspension and the boys parents use open threats against him and the principal before leaving in anger. Ike and his brother are dropped off by Guthrie to his wife’s home – she lives with her domineering sister – and find the house intolerable and their mother again withdrawn into the room. They are even forbidden from going out, and are glad to go back home with their father at the end of two weeks.
The thing escalates when the boys take their revenge on the boys by dropping them far away and forcing them to walk home, naked.
Just when she gets to know them and like them, Dwayne comes to meet her in the shop and we learn he is the one who made her pregnant. She simply ups and leaves with him to Denver without even a backward glance or communication to all the people who were nice to her. You feel the unfairness of it in every word author writes.
The story moves with great speed, there are no great resolutions or surprise twists, and yet, towards the end, you get the feeling of having had a ringside view in the events of a small town in America, which is a good achievement by Kent.
And this is what Kent does well – at least in this book, as I have not read any of his other books. He narrates matter of factly all the emotional and dramatic events with no embellishments and with no added emotion of his own but you keenly feel the pain, betrayal, injustice in the scene. Nice.
Meanwhile the worry and the disappointment (when they finally hear of what she had done) of the brothers touches you deeply. One of them is also deeply upset by the wagging tongues in the town (since two old men kept a young girl in their house, alone) while the other takes it fully in his stride.
She finds that Dwayne does not even care for the health of the baby and so she runs away back to the brothers, and they accept her again. Meanwhile Guthrie starts a steady relationship with Maggie Jones.
The book ends with some moving incidents, some little drama and in a finally satisfying manner.
Nothing earthshaking, nothing overly dramatic, no action like thrillers, and yet this book is deeply satisfying and the story stays in your mind for a long time.
A great book to read, and it deserves at least 8/10
— Krishna