[mstigerlily]

TITLE: Fourth of July Creek
AUTHOR: Smith Henderson
GENRE: Fiction, Literary
PUBLISHED: May 27, 2014
RATING: ★★★★★

PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism

Description: In this shattering and iconic American novel, PEN prize-winning writer, Smith Henderson explores the complexities of freedom, community, grace, suspicion and anarchy, brilliantly depicting our nation's disquieting and violent contradictions.

Social worker Pete Snow lives in remote, impoverished Tenmile, Montana, in part because he’s hiding out from the fallout of his own fractious divorce and in part because he knows that poverty breeds dysfunctional families, and there are plenty of kids who need his care. When he is summoned to open a file on Benjamin Pearl, a nearly feral 11-year-old boy who is suffering from malnutrition, he comes into contact with the boy’s father, Jeremiah, a paranoid survivalist who mints his own money and is convinced that the end-time is near. Pete soon learns that the FBI is also interested in Jeremiah, targeting him as a homegrown terrorist. Meanwhile, Pete’s own family is in crisis; his teenage daughter has vanished, and his ex-wife can’t do much more than drink and pray. First-novelist Henderson not only displays an uncanny sense of place—he clearly knows rural Montana and its impassable roads, its dank bars, its speed freaks and gas huffers—he also creates an incredibly rich cast of characters, from Pete’s drunken, knuckleheaded friends to the hard-luck waitress who serves him coffee to the disturbed, love-sick survivalist. Dark, gritty, and oh so good.

Review: When I finished Fourth of July Creek, I found it so beautifully written I couldn't believe it was the first book for this author. If you remember reading any of my previous 5 star reviews (such as Candy by Luke Davies, The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld or The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara), you will note that I value beautiful writing about memorable characters in often depressing or twisted situations. In this case, in Fourth of July Creek, Henderson tells of an America most of us never see. The protagonist of Fourth of July Creek is Pete Snow, a social worker saddled with a drinking problem and a dysfunctional family of his own travels around Montana, trying to rescue families much worse off than his own damaged family unit. He works almost exclusively with the desperately poor and uneducated people who live in tiny towns who are rarely able to break the cycle of poverty that stays with them for generations. Henderson introduces a lot of people and situations in this book who will haunt you long after you finish the novel. One sad creature, Benjamin Pearl will remain in your thoughts long after finishing the book, and his father, the deranged Jeremiah Pearl may appear in your nightmares...

(Pete) trailed off. Benjamin was naked. All knobs and knots, white and gaunt, and he put Pete in mind of creatures that lived in caves, albino spiders and eyeless fishes and newts. A white boy with purple and brown bruises and dirt and pink scar tissue and all those jaundiced whorls, all of the colors so faint in the whelming whiteness of him. He was nacreous, mother-of-pearl, this son of Pearl. And about his thighs and stomach a leopard dappling of liver spots, his penis scotched in his new pubes like a gray node. You thought not of flesh at the sight of his body, but minerals. It was a small astonishment that he was mobile, that this pearlescent boy clutched himself with bony arms.
“This isn’t necessary,” Pete said. “There’s no reason he needs to suffer.”
“You go,” the light, the elder Pearl, said. “You come back, you can expect a fatal wrath. You tell the same thing to the feds.”
“The feds? Nobody’s coming. Nothing like that is going on here.”
“You’ve come, haven’t you?”
The fact that the man spoke settled Pete’s nerves some. He could interact. Pete could do his job.
“I’m just returning your boy. I’m not bringing any trouble. All my job here is to help.”
“You come clothed in weakness, but I know what stands behind you. You insinuate yourself among good people and you rot them from the inside with your diseases and mental illnesses.”
Crazy talk. What to say? You don’t push him. You don’t test him.
“You need to put these clothes back on this boy,” Pete said plainly, astonished at the brazenness of it. Despite the rifle, the light, his fear. “If I thought you were going to make him strip naked in weather like this, I wouldn’t have brought him back at all. And if you think I’m just going to allow this boy to freeze—”
The beam shot into the trees and Pete followed it as it skittered to rest and lanced the black canyon, realizing too late that the man had simply dropped the light and was coming at him. Before Pete could recover his vision, Jeremiah Pearl was on him, had him by the jacket and was lifting him with one arm and pitching him backward to the ground. Pete lay there stunned. His vision a waterfall of sparks. His head rang. Those black angry eyes, even now striking fear into him. Pete threw up his arm helplessly and scuttled backward into a tree.
He now made out Pearl squatting right over him with his rifle in one hand. The man’s breath, body, and beard stunk like a smudge pot.
“I’ll put one in that boy’s brain before I let you have him. That is a solemn fuckin promise.”
He leaned forward. Pete flinched. The man spat on him. Then he whipped around and heaved his naked son up onto his hip and jogged into the brush.

By the way, this is how I imagine Jeremiah Pearl...



Pete has a soft spot for the smallest and saddest victims of poverty - the children. Often, they are desperately poor and lack the basic necessities. Some of them are past the point of hope, or caring. Stunned by the infinite variety of physical, emotional and sexual abuse he witnesses, he struggles to stay focused. But not all of the victims are easy to like: he particularly struggles with a rebellious teenage boy in his care named Cecil...

“You laugh? Go on. But let me tell you a secret. Kids like you, they become the worst ones. Maybe because it’s too late to send in someone your age. I dunno. But something just quits in kids like you and you become bad men. You go in wild ungovernables and you come out bad men.” Pete balled a fist and slugged Cecil in the gut and as he doubled over Pete grabbed his face with his right hand and hit the boy again just under the opposite rib, dropping him to his knees. On the ground, the boy quietly kecked. Pete knelt. “You can’t believe it, can you?” he asked. “How could this be, you ask yourself.” Cecil looked up at him, flushed and gagging. Pete had never laid a finger on a client before. Not once done a thing in anger. And he wasn’t angry now. He was as astonished as the boy. “All right,” Pete said. “Quit moaning. You’re all right.” He lifted him up and brushed the pebbles and twigs from both their knees. He straightened Cecil’s T-shirt and met his tearing, enraged eye. “Your mama doesn’t want you anymore. The Cloningers are good people and you ruined that. Maybe for other kids too. But you have this uncle. So I want to know: will you stay here?” Cecil balled and unballed his fists. Bewildered and scared and angry. “Look, I ain’t the one that hit you,” Pete said. The kid blinked at the naked lie. “I ain’t,” Pete repeated. “Those punches sure as shit come through me but they were not mine. As meant for you as they were, they were not mine.” “Fuck you, man,” Cecil whispered. “I am not just an agent of the state. I’m an agent of your future. I’m a goddamn time traveler. And, I promise you, that little tune-up was just a preview.”

You see, Pete might be able to help a lot of the people in Tenmile, but he is under a lot of stress, both personal and professional. He has left his wife, his teenage daughter is rebellious and bitter, he lives in a desolate cabin with no electricity, he turns away his own family members in need: he is exhausted by the demands of his job. Pete alternates between being a hero, and a bit of a loser, which makes him interesting - and human. There is a heartbreaking subplot about his runaway teenage daughter and his efforts to find her.

But the writing is what really what sets this book apart. As Henderson casually describes scenes, even nondescript or ordinary objects become poetry...

"Chromed long-haulers glinted like showgirls among logging trucks caked in oatmealy mud, white exhaust thrashing flamelike in the wind from their silvery stacks."

and

“How trout looked in that water, brown and wavering and glinting all the colors there were and maybe some that didn’t really exist on the color wheel, a color, say, that was moss and brown-spotted like peppercorns and a single terra-cotta-colored stone and a flash of sunlight all at once. That color existed in the water here.”

Other writers who choose to write about the characters and situations like these might have chosen to use a simpler style of writing. The prose Henderson uses is so startling by contrast, it's as if one one of the desperately poor and uneducated children found in the novel suddenly started spouting Shakespeare or speaking Latin. Overall, this is a brutal, astounding and brilliant novel. 5 stars.

this book is very good