Amazon.com Review
Midway through Jeffrey Lent's turbulent and lyrical first novel, a wayward son indulges a sobering reflection. "Mostly, people are cruel, given the chance," Jamie Pelham observes, not only assuaging his own disappointments but also affirming the intransigence of deed and memory--and prejudice. In the Fall is freighted with such moments, as a postbellum Yankee family strives to fathom its past in order to clarify its present. What they find, as Lent's tale ambles over three generations, is the danger of probing too deeply. When 17-year-old Norman Pelham departs his father's Vermont farm to join the Union army, he can little anticipate the incredulity and scorn that his return--accompanied by his former-slave bride--will elicit. The newlyweds make a go of country life, Leah's industry wins the locals' begrudging respect, and the two transact a fidelity that only rarely acknowledges their racial dissimilarities. Leah, however, who fled her native North Carolina after lashing out violently against a lifetime of abuse, believes an inescapable retribution stalks her. And so, beset with guilt and anxious to confront her own past, she briefly leaves Norman and their three children, throwing all five lives into disarray. Her desperation eventually reemerges in her youngest child, the volatile Jamie, who abandons farm life for bootlegging and rash romance. When his own ruthlessness undoes him, it falls to his son, Foster, to uncover the lingering mystery of Leah's life and death, as well as the obstinate racism that has stalked the Pelhams.
Throughout its pages, In the Fall suggests that identity consists of an undeniable duality--that although we can make of ourselves what we will, we can never completely efface what made us. Foster, upon returning to the farm his father had left years before, understands that it is "a world he was not even sure he wanted part of, and yet a part of it belonged to him by the simple fact of his existence." Unlike his grandmother, though, who found only a disillusioning misery in self-discovery, or his father, who simply shirked the quest, Foster is confident of redemption. Despite a few prolonged episodes and an occasionally portentous dialogue, Jeffrey Lent's debut is admirable, a sobering and painstaking chronicle of the persistence of tragedy and the irrefutability of hope. --Ben Guterson
From Publishers Weekly
The immediacy of the past, the tensions of race, the crushing weight of guilt and the searing intensity of forbidden love drive Lent's expansive, richly detailed and expertly plotted debut novel. Spanning three generations, from the end of the Civil War through Prohibition, the story begins with an interracial marriage between a Vermont soldier and a runaway slave girl. Nineteen-year-old Norman Pelham is wounded and dying in the woods of Virginia near the end of the war when 16-year-old Leah finds and saves him. She has fled Sweetboro, N.C., after killing her owner's sonAher own half brotherAwhen he tried to rape her. Norman and Leah know better than to allow their initial attraction to flower into love, but they cannot ignore their passion, and they marry on the road to Vermont. In brisk, confident detail, Lent recreates many historical scenesAsoldiers returning wearily home, cider-pressing time in Vermont, the ins and outs of bootlegging and whiskey-running in the resort mountains of New Hampshire in the '20s. The male charactersANorman, his son and youngest child, Jamie, and Jamie's son, FosterAprovide the narrative thread for the novel; but it is Leah whose story thematically unites the lives of husband, son, and grandson. Twenty-five years after her flight, Leah finds that she cannot continue to put the past behind her and must go back to Sweetboro. What she discovers there, and never reveals to her husband or to either of her grown daughters, is a mystery until her grandson Foster finally makes his own trip south. Lent's prose is sometimes lyrical to a fault, but otherwise remarkable for its grace, felicity and precision. Engrossing, wonderfully written, with a full gallery of believable and sympathetic characters, this first novel introduces an ambitious and talented writer. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. BOMC main selection; QPB selection; paperback rights to Vintage; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Sweden and Greece. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This debut novel is a monumental family narrative that traces three generations following the Civil War. As the novel opens, a wounded Union solider named Norman is befriended by Leah, an escaped slave. Eventually, they marry and return to Norman's home in Vermont, where they raise a family despite their neighbors' intolerance. When their children are still young, Leah returns to the South and discovers the truth about her past, which leads to her suicide. The next section of the book covers the life of son Jamie, who leaves the farm for a criminal life in the city. After he falls in love with a whore named Joey, they move from the city and raise two children until Joey and their daughter die of influenza. Jamie, who makes his living as a bootlegger, raises his son, Foster, until Jamie becomes snarled with criminals from his past and is killed. The final part of the novel follows Foster, who discovers two aunts whom his father never mentioned. "The world," offers his Aunt Prudence as an explanation, "is a great huge stone that don't care how many times you hurl yourself against it." Against his aunts' wishes, Foster travels down South and learns the secret that led to his grandmother Leah's suicide. The extremely captivating plot and absorbing characters are tied together in a heartfelt manner that will dazzle every reader. Highly recommended.
---David A. Beron?, Univ. of New England, Biddleford, ME
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
To say that this is an astonishing piece of work for a first-time novelist underrates it. This is an astonishing piece of work--period. This epic story of three generations of Americans opens as the Civil War is ending. Part 1 takes place on the Pehlam family farm in Vermont, where Union soldier Norman returns with his bride, a runaway slave called Leah. Part 2 seems to turn its back on the first, as does Norman and Leah's youngest child and only son, Jamie, in his flight to New Hampshire. Light-skinned enough to "pass," even to his wife and children, Jamie lives a hard, fast life as a bootlegger. Only on the death of his father does Jamie's son Foster begin to piece together, in the deep Southern early home of his grandmother, the fragments of the past that reveal to him the truth about Leah's history and her fate. No part of Lent's narrative is superficial. Loamy and visceral, Lent's writing is deeply introspective, intelligent, and beautifully descriptive. Grace Fill
Review
Aside from the occasional narrative awkwardness expected in a first novel, it's a majestic, vital book. -- The New York Times Book Review, Tony Earley
From the Author
Jeffrey Lent's Favorite Books: Dalva and The Road Home, by Jim Harrison; A Goat's Song, by Dermot Healy; In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaatje; Postcards, by E. Annie Proulx; The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald
