From Publishers Weekly
Fire imagery flares throughout Farrington's incandescent second novel (after The California Book of the Dead), in which narrator Jeremy Mason, a painter, mulls over the sudden death of his former lover, the blues-singing Hannah of the title, and journeys with their love-child to Nebraska to identify her body. This tale unfolds alongside the story of the passionate couple, of Jeremy's subsequent marriage to nurturing LeeAnne and of the remarkable, inextricable intertwining of the lives of the three adults. Spanning the mid-1970s to the present, the narrative captures the self-absorption, naive insights and fresh intimacies of college years, and the sometimes painful wisdom and liberating self-knowledge that come with growing up. Equally at home describing the artist's challenge in the face of a blank canvas or making up his own adult-contemporary version of the blues, Farrington's images and metaphors favor a purple palette (in both senses), but even so he leads us on a memorable, refreshingly lucid expedition across two decades and vast terrains of human connection: love, parenting, friendship and marriage.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
When Hannah Johnson dies at 39 in a fiery car crash, Jeremiah Mason--her best friend, sometime lover, and father of their child--describes their long relationship, which was as sweet as it was painful. With his 8-year-old son, Sammy, and Hannah's handwritten will in hand, Mason leaves his pregnant wife, LeeAnne, and goes to handle arrangements, during which he tells the moving story of the previous 20 years in seamlessly woven flashbacks. The instant spark between Hannah and Mason in college, fueled by their love of art and occasionally igniting into passion, threatens Mason's commitment to college sweetheart LeeAnne, who represents golden contentment to him, in contrast to Hannah's intensity and fire. Fortunately, LeeAnne's forgiveness is deep, but it wavers when Mason's infidelity drives her to torch his garden--but then it extends to raising his love child as her own. Farrington has created a cast of appealing, idiosyncratic characters--in prose that is crisp and studded with insight--to deliver the message that experience and insight are worth the pain of loss. Michele Leber
