Book Review: Hard Rain Falling (1966) by Don Carpenter

In one of my recent book reviews I ranted about writers reviewing the works of other authors. Hard Rain Falling has glowing testimonials from George Pelacanos, Anne Lamott, Richard Price and Jonathan Lethem. I guess they're the exception that proves the rule, because Carpenter's novel is a startlingly original work that, rather amazingly, was out of print for a very long time. The problem may have been that upon first publication it was advertised and reviewed as a crime novel. Jack Levitt, the novel's central character, moves in a criminal milieu most of the time but crime fiction fans would have been bitterly disappointed, not to say shocked, by Carpenter's relentless focus on Levitt's existential despair and anger. Yes, this is pure literary fiction, having more in common with novels by writers such as Sartre, Camus, and Patrick Hamilton than anything from the hard-boiled or noir schools of crime fiction.

Levitt is raised in an orphanage in rural Oregon in the late 1940s after being abandoned by his feckless parents at an early age. Jack runs away from the orphanage to Portland where he becomes a petty criminal, hanging around pool halls, scrounging a living from the occasional job or petty theft. It's there he first meets Billy Lancing, a black teenager who's also a runaway like Jack. Billy has a tremendous gift for shooting pool and makes his living hustling games. The two don't really become friends, but Jack finds something admirable or appealing in Billy's pure talent. The story hops in and out of Jack's wandering life, which is mostly spent in divey hotels and bars. He also ends up in jails and, finally, in San Quentin prison. In prison Jack is reunited with Billy, whose life has been almost as messed up as Jack's. Jack spends three years in prison with Billy as his cellmate, and they eventually become lovers. Shortly before Jack is released, Billy is murdered while trying to protect him from a prison gang. Jack finally goes straight after leaving the "Q", as it's called, and ends up married to a woman from a much higher social bracket. Complications ensue.

When we first meet Jack as a teenager he's a brutalized, empty soul, and his character arc in the novel can be loosely described as a philosophical and psychological journey to acquire some humanity. It's not an easy, pleasant or entirely successful trip. Jack sees no meaning in the world and barely any value in existence itself. Here's a taste of Jack's acid view of life:

"All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it."

 Jack absolutely revels in the power of negative thinking. Almost all the novel is written in this tone, but the perfect clarity and ferocious honesty of Jack's scathing analysis of existence (as seen from his perspective) is actually exhilarating. This kind of writing can easily drift into tediousness and cheap nihilism, but with Jack we believe that his brutish, streetwise existential angst is coming from actual experience. Jack's seen the worst from people and so he's basing his worldview on bitter experience. Literature is filled with middle-class characters saying roughly the same things, but most of the time they sound like solipsistic whiners. Jack doesn't have a self-pitying bone in his body.

The most powerful part of the novel might be the relationship between Jack and Billy. The two men don't discover that they're gay while in prison, they discover that they have a desperate need for intimacy and love. The sex is secondary, and the awakening of Jack's humanity is attributable to his romantic relationship with Billy, brief though it is. The other exemplary aspect of the novel is the way in which Carpenter captures the flavour of life on the fringes of society. The atmosphere and cynical camaraderie found in pool halls, bowling alleys and cheap hotels is vividly described, and the scenes set in prison are the best of their kind I've ever read outside a memoir.

One way of looking at Hard Rain Falling is as a modern, R-rated retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Both novels are picaresque (more or less), and both have a surprising relationship between a black and white youth. And in turn, it's obvious that Hard Rain Falling has exerted its own influence on later writers, specifically Jonathan Lethem, whose The Fortress of Solitude (my review) is clearly based on Carpenter's template. In fact, Lethem edited Carpenter's last, and unfinished, novel Friday's at Enrico's which was released just this year. The only flaw in Hard Rain Falling is one also shared by The Fortress of Solitude: both novels sputter and fumble at the end. Jack's relationship and marriage with Sally brings the novel down to earth with a thump. The writing remains intense, but the relationship's ups and downs veer towards melodrama more often than not. The entire last quarter of the novel is poorly conceived and the finale is clumsily abrupt rather than intriguingly ambiguous, which is probably what Carpenter was aiming for. Even with this problem, Hard Rain Falling is a remarkable novel that deserves a new readership.

Book Review: The Death Defying Pepper Roux (2009) by Geraldine McCaughrean

Finding this book shelved in the teen section is a bit like having Anna Karenina stuck in with the Harlequin romances, or Metamorphosis kept in sci-fi/fantasy. This isn't just a great teen novel, it's a great novel. In fact, I'd guess that the publisher probably hurt sales by not marketing it as another Life of Pi. It should have been sold as an adult novel with a teen protagonist rather than as a young adult novel.

Pepper Roux is a 14 year-old boy living in a French coastal town. The time period is the early 1900s, but that's only a guess, and the era isn't too terribly important to the story. Pepper's family consists of a mother, father and aunt. Aunt Mireille is a religious fanatic who, on the day of Pepper's birth, claimed that St. Constance appeared to her in a vision and said that Pepper would die on his fourteenth birthday. Pepper's parents are under Mireille's thumb, or at least believe totally in her prophecy. Pepper has grown up certain in the knowledge that he will die on his fourteenth birthday. His whole life has been a preparation for his terminal day. The terrible day arrives and Pepper decides to run away from his fate. What follows is a novel with a structure that's part odyssey, part picaresque, but unlike most picaresque novels the main character is neither a rogue or a rascal, although Pepper does, in all innocence, commit some rascalish acts. It's hard to outline the plot without making the story sound overly whimsical, but Pepper becomes, by turn, a sea captain, a reporter, a meat cutter, a French Legionnaire, a horse wrangler, a telegraph boy, and a husband, all in an effort to disguise himself and thus hide from St. Constance's wrath. Along the way, as is the case with a picaresque novel, Pepper learns much about the human character, both it's nobility and its cruelty.

The general tone of Roux is light and humorous, but there are darker elements, particularly the anguish Pepper goes through as he tries to live with the constant fear of God coming down to snatch him up. The quality of the writing, McCaughrean's ability to craft striking sentences, metaphors and similies is what's most astonishing about this novel. I can't think of another recent novel I've read that shows more agility and  joie de vivre with the English language. Equally good is her skill at alternating dark and whimsical elements. Not getting the balance right can really ruin a novel, but McCaughrean manages it flawlessly. The best example is her handling of Yvette, an abused woman who  Pepper becomes a "husband" to. Yvette is nearly mute but the author makes her very real, and her pain is truly affecting but not so much so that it makes the novel uncomfortably serious.

I actually wouldn't recommend this book to teens unless they're up for a highly unconventional plot structure and an equally odd main character. This novel doesn't fit easily into most teen fiction genres. It has aburd, surreal moments but it's not a fantasy, nor is it about garden variety teen problems. Really, the novel it most closely resembles is Candide or perhaps The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. So far, it's the best novel I've read this year.