Abbeville [Hardcover]

Jack Fuller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2008

Until the dot-com bubble burst, George Bailey never gave much thought to why his grandfather seemed so happy, but then George's wealth vanished, rocking his self-confidence, threatening his family's security and making his adolescent son's difficult life even more painful. Returning to the little Central Illinois farm town of Abbeville, where his grandfather had prospered and then fallen into ruin, flattened during the Depression, Feorge seeks out the details of this remarkable man's rise, fall and spiritual rebirth, hoping he might find a way to recover himself. Abbeville sweeps through the history of late-19th through early 21st century America-among loggers stripping the North Woods bare, at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, with French soldiers at the Battle of Verdun, into the abyss of the Depression, and finally toward the new millennium's own nightmares. At the same time it examines life at its most intimate. How can one hold onto meaning amidst the brutally indifferent cycles of war and peace, flood and drought, boom and bust, life and death? In clean, evocative prose that reveals the compexity of people's moral and spiritual lives, Fuller tells the simple story of a man riding the crests and chasms of the 20th century, struggling through personal grief, war, and material failure to find a place where the spirit may repose. An American story about rediscovering where we've been and how we've come to be who we are today, Abbeville tells the tale of the world in small, of one man's pilgrimage to come to terms with himself while learning to embrace the world around him.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial writer Fuller (Fragments) delivers a resonant, intricate saga of the multigenerational Bailey/Schumpeter family of Abbeville, a farming community in central Illinois. Karl Schumpeter goes to work as a clerk at his uncle's logging outfit before moving at the end of the 19th century to cosmopolitan Chicago to deal in grain futures. Once married, young Karl returns to Abbeville and prospers as an entrepreneur and banker. Almost 40 at the outbreak of WWI, Karl oddly travels to France to serve in the ambulance corps (showing shades of Hemingway, another Illinoisan). Later, after Black Tuesday, Karl's illegal loans to friends and family land him in prison. Impoverished and humiliated, Karl eventually returns home to Abbeville and the shell of his former life. Years later, Karl's grandson, George Bailey, loses his livelihood in the dot-com bust and searches for meaning and strength by examining Karl's earlier travails. However, the dot-com bust pales when juxtaposed to the 1929 crash. The tales of the past generations feel more compelling and immediate. Fuller's a talented writer, and his gifts are on full display when chronicling Karl's life and times. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Fuller, author of The Best of Jackson Payne (2000), a superb jazz novel, now turns to a more conventional, multigenerational tale of life in Middle America. Although the story of a grandfather and his grandson, both entrepreneurs who fall on hard times, is less complex structurally and thematically than the saga of saxophone phenom Payne, it, too, finds the deep core of humanity in its characters. George, the grandson, a Chicago financier whose career crashes when the dot-com bubble bursts, turns for guidance to the life of his grandfather, Karl, a Central Illinois businessman, whose fortune was lost in the Depression. Jumping between George and Karl, Fuller moves from logging in Michigan’s North Woods, through commodities trading in early-twentieth-century Chicago, to farming in small-town Abbeville, Illinois, following Karl’s attempts to build a legacy and then to reconstruct a life after the legacy crumbles. Each segment of the story pulses with the emotion of felt life, but it is the cumulative effect, the building realization of what family interconnectedness can mean to the individual, that gives this old-fashioned novel its contemporary power. --Bill Ott

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Unbridled Books; 1st edition (June 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193296147X
• ISBN-13: 978-1932961478
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,318,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Fortune is not the outcome of a test. Good or bad, it is the test.", June 20, 2008

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Abbeville (Hardcover)

Opening in 2000, with the return of middle-aged George Bailey to the desolate home and community of his grandfather in Abbeville, in central Illinois, this novel traces the fortunes and misfortunes of several generations of the same family. George has recently lost his considerable personal assets in the crumbling of his venture capital business, and his temporary return to Abbeville, where his grandfather achieved unprecedented success before losing everything in the Depression, is an attempt to figure out how his grandfather put his losses behind him and went on. Karl Schumpeter, George's grandfather possessed an unwavering ethical sense and a staunch sense of responsibility to his family and community, and he managed to persevere, serving as a model for his children, grandchildren, and community at large.

Like Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, by Steven Millhauser, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, this novel has an enormous scope, and in its attempt to show the panorama of American history over more than a century, it shows major events from the late 1800s to the present and their effects on families and communities. The logging industry and industrialization of rural areas at the turn of the century, World War I and its battles, the Crash of 1929, and World War II all affect the main characters, their wives, and children. Because of the long time frame, the reader comes to know the characters in terms of their reactions to seminal events, but the characters are not as fully developed as they might have been in a novel with a smaller focus.

Author Jack Fuller vividly recreates the atmosphere of the logging camps, the frantic activity of panicked citizens who are about to lose their life savings in the Crash, the torments of war, and the personal rivalries and vendettas which often accompany small town life. Karl Schumpeter, George's grandfather gives life and inspiration to his family and to Abbeville, even as he loses his bank, his grain storage facility, his general store, and all his local assets. His loyalty and his empathy for others make him an admirable character across time and place. George, visiting the old homestead and its memories hopes to absorb some of life's lessons in Abbeville.

Alternating among generations, the narrative is fast-paced, but that pace, and the scale of the time frame, lead to a novel in which the author develops his themes of ambition, entrepreneurship, honor, and responsibility, somewhat at the expense of character development. When George is visited by his teenage son, with whom he takes a fly-fishing trip, like the trips he made with his father and grandfather, his son is ultimately able to learn some of the lessons passed on through the family for five generations, continuing the novel's themes into another era like a multi-generational morality play. n Mary Whipple

Fragments (Phoenix Fiction Series)
The Best of Jackson Payne: A Novel
News Values: Ideas for an Information Age
Convergence (Phoenix Fiction Series)
Biography - Fuller, Jack William (1946-): An article from: Contemporary Authors Online

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars " 'Money can be like fire.' ", August 3, 2008

By 

K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Abbeville (Hardcover)

This George Bailey's life isn't so wonderful. The 2000 dot com bust forces him and his family to undergo painful financial contractions. George is also worried about his son, Rob. The teenager doesn't see worth in himself and George wants to find a way to reach him. Feeling adrift, George returns to Abbeville, home to his ancestors, to remember his grandfather's life there:

Karl Schumpeter grew up in this farming village in Illinois in the waning part of the 19th century. He learned to fly fish up in the North Woods when his father sent him to learn the logging business with his Uncle John. Karl emulated his uncle when he returned to Abbeville by "thinking big." He built a modern grain elevator and installed a dynamo for electrical power. He was the town banker and the sheriff for a while. Karl was at Verdun during the Great War and when he returned was able to exert leadership that kept the town isolated from the devastation of the Spanish influenza. Karl's expansive business philosophy could not, however, withstand the Great Depression. As George notes, " 'It had never occurred to me that one day I might be wiped out by the market the way Grandpa had been.' " Karl did his utmost to shield his bank depositors and his overextended brother, but his guilt over his own bad judgment prompted him to docilely accept a plea bargain from a vindictive district attorney, who, when they were young, had wanted to marry Cristina, Karl's wife. After nearly two years in prison, he returned and "purged himself through sweat." Gone was his determination to take risks for the sake of progress and personal enrichment. Instead, he took simple jobs: he became the industrious school janitor and the postman. George, in reviewing his grandfather's life, sees the parallels. " 'Money can be like fire,' " Karl said once. George, caught like his forebear, in a serious economic downturn, understands the simile.

In France during World War I, a priest told Karl, "In this life God's grace is nothing you earn, nor is punishment the proof of sin. This is the first great mystery, and it is only made bearable by the second, which is love." Karl remembered those words twenty years later when he was about to enter the state prison, and he thought, "Maybe a man could only live if he didn't fight the forces that tossed him about. Maybe he could learn to love them as he was supposed to love God." ABBEVILLE considers the cycles that humanity rides. It considers how much is the aggregate of human error and how much are effects beyond human control. It does this in luminous language that pins us into the highlights of Karl's life and how George and Rob may learn from him. This novel is filled with sterling insights about the human condition and how the beauties of the natural world may be the balm and the correction for our tendencies to exalt ourselves and our abilities to influence our environment and our time. The lessons of fly fishing trump those of empire building, if you will. Highly recommended. 4.5 stars.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another superb novel, July 19, 2008

By 

Donald E. Graham (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Abbeville (Hardcover)

This short, poignant, loving and lovely book will increase Jack Fuller's reputation--and about time.

Mr. Fuller is the author of half a dozen outstanding novels--and is a friend of mine. I don't believe I am writing as a friend: I cannot imagine a reader who wouldn't fall in love with this book.

It is a tale of five generations in a family, but the patriarch runs away with the book. Karl Schumpeter, the banker, philanthropist, and almost everything else in Abbeville, has a grandson named George Bailey--but it's Karl who will bring to your mind a more worldly Jimmy Stewart. You'll meet half a dozen characters you will enjoy thinking about, but Karl's story will stay in your mind a long time.

If you like Abbeville as much as I did, you may want to read Fragments, Fuller's excellent Vietnam novel, or The Best of Jackson Payne, the story of a jazz musician.