- Unknown Binding: 256 pages
- Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (Aug 8 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0805067221
- ISBN-13: 978-0805067224
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.5 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The brutally hard life of sheep ranchers on the Great Plains just after WWII provides the heartbeat of Lennon's brooding third novel. As in his 1997 debut, The Light of Shooting Stars, Lennon laconically records the punishing hardships of the Western landscape, counterbalanced by the open skies that, one characters says, have "ruined us for any other kind of life." From the start, doom and ruin hang over the Person family. Three of the six sons of John and Asta Person are fated to die young. A fourth, Thornton, is killed in WWII, and Grant, the brother whose place Thornton took in the draft, bolts from the ranch and labors on a fishing trawler for three years. Meanwhile, his brother Max assumes his responsibilities and his mother dies; when Grant finally returns, he discovers that his father has taken off for parts unknown. A bitter and resentful Max then leaves, too, for New York, to paint. Grant copes with a mountain of debts, a sickly flock and elderly ranch hands. Lonely, taciturn and racked by guilt, Grant exists in a dour, gray world defined by monotonous labor and hard-bitten men. When Max returns with a young woman, Sophia, love suddenly erupts in Grant, presaging sibling rivalry and a dramatic denouement. While Grant's intensely inward personality and his existence on life's "chill periphery," may initially alienate the reader, Lennon artfully heightens the emotional temperature with Grant's recurrent, prefiguring dream of a dead man he saw in Atlantic City. Fiercely realistic descriptions suffuse Lennon's prose: "gulls dangled overhead, tufted and greasy like dead wool"; "the cod's caustic eye twitching against the caustic air." The result is a terse and haunting story that speaks of the inescapable bonds of blood, the ineluctable hold of the land and the healing powers of work and solitude.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
It's clear from the first page of his quietly stunning third novel that Lennon doesn't intend to write the same book twice. This is a major departure from both the well-received The Light of Falling Stars, about the after-effects of a plane crash, and The Funnies, a wry look at a dysfunctional family. After World War II ends, Grant Person leaves his family's ranch on the Great Plains and heads for the East Coast. Behind him is the wreckage of a once-thriving family. Out of six brothers, only Grant and Max, his much younger brother, are left. Their mother's death three years later propels Grant home, and he finds the ranch fallen on hard times: his father is gone, and Max is on his way out the door to pursue his art. When Max returns the following year, he brings his girlfriend, whose presence sets up a disastrous conflict between the two men. Brotherly love gone bad, solitude turning to a rancid loneliness, the workings of fate, and a guilty conscience: this is the stuff of Greek tragedy, and Lennon does a masterly job of showing us a man who realizes that he is destined to "live a few scant miles from the heart of life, on its chill periphery." Highly recommended. Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
When the war was over, Grant clipped his hair close and made the long ride out to the flats where the railway ran east-west. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
When the war was over, Grant clipped his hair close and made the long ride out to the flats where the railway ran east-west. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just plain good,
By
This review is from: On the Night Plain: A Novel (Paperback)
J. R. Lennon has mastered the art of capturing the simplest gesture or word , putting it on paper and evoking complex emotions and situations. In this, his third novel, the author takes us to the 1940s in Montana, a sheep ranch where two brothers, Grant and Max, with a complicated history, cut fleece, paint, build resentment and love the same woman. The use of "the dead man" in Grant's dreams is eerily effective. There is no clear cut hero or villian, though you do get inside the head of Grant, who allows himself to be seen as the bad guy rather than let his parents, now long gone, take the heat for tragedies in the family. Looking forward to Lennon's newest.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Burdens shouldered, a life endured. . .,
By
This review is from: On the Night Plain: A Novel (Paperback)
The world created by the novel is one where people in one way or another are crushed by the circumstances of their lives. Set in the 1940s in some unnamed state on the Great Plains, it recounts the early adulthood of a man born on a sheep ranch. The life he inherits is one of loss, mischance, and isolation. One by one his brothers die or are killed, as are his parents, until he is the last one alive. Although he is the point-of-view character throughout (and the reader is likely to feel trapped at times in his consciousness), we learn almost nothing of how he survives, except that he escapes for a while to work on a fishing boat in the Atlantic, and seems to turn off whatever thoughts he might have, knowing that any of them could easily lead him to despair.Guilt and regrets visit him in the form of nightmares, in which a drowned man he once saw on a beach in Atlantic City haunts him wordlessly and gruesomely. These dreams merge so seamlessly with the narrative, it is easy to see the main character's daily existence as an unending bad dream. Briefly he becomes involved with a waitress at a restaurant in town, and in her presence he has moments that touch the tenderness in him, but the role he shoulders is to labor on alone, attempting to salvage the run-down family ranch with the help of hired hands either resigned as he is to their lot in life or bitterly resentful. When his brother, an artist, returns to the ranch with a girl he has met, her presence in this isolated world of laboring men takes a not surprising emotional toll. This is a novel not for every taste. There's a bleakness that will disappoint readers looking for a more romanticized version of the subject matter. There's an emotional flatness that will not suit those looking for drama or even melodrama. There's an absence of introspection and reflection in the protagonist for those looking for psychological depth. Yet the novel chooses a minimalist narrative style (reflected, I suppose, in the absence of punctuation for dialogue) that is appropriate to its story and is in its own way compelling. There is a kind of romance even in the absence of it that pulls you forward, watching the way events unfold among characters whose lives have been greatly reduced by the demands of an unforgiving environment. Author Lennon also has a remarkable gift of stark metaphor for capturing nuances of attitude and emotional coloring in both his characters and his landscape. Finally the book reveals much about sheep ranching for readers of Western literature who've become familiar with the details of raising and working cattle. For the success of the novel's particular vision, I'm happy to recommend it.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Road to Nowhere,
This review is from: On the Night Plain: A Novel
Lack of quote marks, ultra-emotionally-reserved protagonist, a woman he can't have, the self-destruction of a farm -- is this Lennon's homage to Cormac McCarthy? Perhaps. This is by and large a one-note book, and that's what kills it. The book flatlines from beginning to end, and the supporting cast is no help -- they're either annoying (Sophia) or pretentious (Max). And the ending is just lame lame lame. I didn't expect to read The Funnies again, but this was downright torturous, a slow, muddled book that goes nowhere.
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