Phenomenal read. Matt Bondurant (full disclosure - a wide swath of my family tree lies in Franklin County and includes Bondurants, so he's likely a third or fourth cousin) has taken the torch flung by Ron Rash, Lee Smith, and Charles Frazier, and carried it aloft into the literary stratosphere.
There is a way to write gritty, human-centered prose without the grit and gore overtaking the message, so the reader feels the character's experience without the story becoming lost. It's a delicate balance that can elude even the most accomplished writers. Bondurant brings the reader directly into the tale without losing focus, without the distraction of overly descriptive passages that can derail a carefully constructed momentum. And yet, you feel the cold, slicing wind off the Lake and the enveloping, suffocating shock of frigid water, the subliminal thrill of anticipation, the yearning disturbance of complicated sexual desires; the dearth of hope in the miasma of poverty that strangles some of the neighborhoods near the local prison, and the livid disgust of some of the people who have to live there.
Each chapter limns the world of the small, cold border town of North Chazy from the perspective of one or more of its residents in a way that we know is leading toward something horrifying, and yet we live with each of these people in a way that feels real and authentic and causes the reader to lay bets on who will survive, and who will be indelibly changed by the experience - for good or ill. I especially appreciated the ability of the author to give his characters resilience in the form of empathy or knowledge where one doesn't expect it - as in Phil's self-discovery about his relationship with his baby daughter Juliet, as with the strongman Kaiser's almost obsessive affinity for science, with the sorority women's sisterhood that watches for other women in danger and their neatly orchestrated plan for lifting them gently out of it.
Honestly grateful for the opportunity to read this incredible story, thanks to Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for a review. Five-plus stars, and the hope that Matt Bondurant will keep writing, keep storytelling, keep traveling the route of the human mind and its history, and bring those things to light and life on the page.
life between the pages
“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me