A new review of Reckoning on Goodreads: Jay Gertzman rated it 5 of 5 stars I would classify this as a sociological or proletarian novel written in the form of a noir mystery. There should be more of them. To some extent, working class noir, and recently writers such as Woodrell, Williamson, Fondation and others “from the other America,” have done great work. In north-central PA, young people feel they must leave if they can; boys of 14 work from dawn to dusk on farms, everyone knows and has to know guns; Richard’s father knows everything about repairing machinery, and hauling heavy materials around to recondition and sell. Poverty is close, always. And so is spirit, perseverance, and fighting to keep independent enough to make decisions. Richard may make lots of mistakes, but he does so because he lives in an environment “close to the knives.” Car accidents, burned down buildings, and assaults on the innocent have a strange affinity to natural disasters in this corner of “the other America.”. There is real evil in this novel, and Barnes integrates it perfectly with Richard’s coming-of-age. That evil is given a history, and a future, that is essentially noir. It is entangled with the major preoccupation of leaving a place where choices are limited and growth a big question mark. Yet Richard and his girl friend, mom and dad are not the kind of people who run away. They grow where they are planted, I think. The focus on Richard is intense. His desires, fears, and relationships, including that to the evil Lyle Thompson, are profoundly imagined. There are Lyles and his criminality everywhere. I lived in this community and know how fragile its culture is, given the pollution that fracking is now bringing it. Fracking is not mentioned in the book, until the next to the last page, where a “Halliburton truck” pulls into a hospital due to some accident. Shudder. https://goodreads/book/show/20319939-reckoning
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 23:10:53 +0000
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