Fourth of July Creek

. This year' s first novel "Fourth of July Creek" is the best book I have read so far. The Fourth of July Creek Summary & Study Guide contains detailed chapter summaries and analyses, quotes, character descriptions, topics and more. The PEN award winner Smith Henderson talks about his new novel Fourth of July Creek.

Smith Henderson's Fourth of July Creek - Reviews | Manuals

Smiths Henderson's breathtaking first novel, Fourth of July Creek, examines these issues, offering a wealth of characters and play. July Creek's protagonist, Pete Snow, a welfare officer, is also in the midst of a career change, both at work and in private time. Pete tries to salvage the kids of a drug-addicted woman, but cannot salvage his relation to his alienated sister Rose and daugther Rachel.

One unfortunate escapade with an associate, a broken probation bro and the deaths of a member of his immediate household help alienate Pete from his own world. Jeremiah Pearl walks into this vortex with his boy Ben. Older Pearl is a gullible conspiracist, completely underpinned by the Old Testament, who has imposed his vision of the real world on semi-wild Ben.

Pearl brought "broken money" into the game in another act of insurrection, coin into which he punched and blemished with corroded symbol ism of destruction and mayhem. As one pawnshop puts it, Pearl has become a "hysterical numismatist" in the fight with the state. Is Pearl the poster boy of a dissatisfaction that causes violent conflict when the coin becomes beloved by marginal groups?

When Pete Pearl has gained his confidence, he begins to examine how he became a houseless, Parisian hiker and even interviews former boyfriends. Probably the most unrealistic tale about Pearl comes from a lumberjack called Vandine, who was held by the Pearls while riding through a rainstorm of ashes due to the Mt. St. Helens outburst.

Pearl, who confuses the ashes with atomic precipitation, thinks that the end time has come and orders Ben to kill Vandine "wrapped in ashes up to his eyes". This man can hardly escape with his own Iife. From Vandine's and Pete's conversations to a third-person Vandine viewpoint, this pretty, cursed sequence highlights some of the author's extraordinary narratives.

It even recounts Rachel's heartbreaking tale of his escape from his homeland in the shape of a set of welfare workers' accounts linked to the other sections. Attracted by his responsibilities towards the undernourished Ben and made fragile by the dark facts of his own lives, Pete's possession of pearls opens him up to a peril that is not only ideological; the Feds shut themselves in, and inquisitiveness can look like a clash.

Pete can still see the differences between the two at some point. At the end the Fourth of July Creek provides the promise of confrontation and revelation, but they are not what one might have expected. Not so much a down-to-earth look as a surprising piece about Pearl, which shows how even apparently small things can get out of control in living and dying circumstances and how the private can contaminate the course of pubic happenings.

At the beginning of the tale Pete remarks: "We are all animal. - Jeff VanderMeer's latest novel is Authority (Fourth Estate). For £13.49 Fourth of the July Creek, call the Guardian Bookservice on 0330 333 6846 or visit guardianbookshop.co.uk.