Will Vaughn looks back in a painful retrospective at the controversy surrounding his mother's love affair and subsequent departure from the small town of New Holland, recounting the story of his parents' marriage, life on the farm, and their final break."
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
In this third novel from the author of The Very Air (LJ 8/93), journalist Will Vaughn weaves together memories from the summer of 1957, when his mother had an affair that scandalized their rural Iowan community and served as a catalyst for her leaving the family. Bauer's use of Will as the storyteller is both the book's strength and its weakness. While effectively capturing Will's confusion and at times his pain, the first-person narrative weakens the novel, as adult conversations and actions are either re-created or imagined by Will. Consequently, the motives and actions of his parents are not fully developed, and the novel's adults are more caricatures than characters. It's too bad, for the book has the elements of a good story, but they simply fail to come together compellingly. Recommended for regional collections where interest warrants.?Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll., Sudbury, Ontario
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Young novelist Bauer (The Very Air, 1993; Dexterity, 1989) offers, for our third helping, a rural coming-of-age tale that could hardly taste more overcooked had it been left on the stove all night. Its Writers' Workshop notwithstanding, Iowa is not the usual destination of choice for the young and the ambitious. So when LeAnne Vaughn's husband Lewis brings her back to his family's farm in New Holland, she has to take her time adjusting. LeAnne was a small-town singer who grew up in Wyoming with big things on her mind--until she met Lewis in the bar in Cheyenne where she sang. At the time, he had been in the Army, and the world seemed filled with possibilities to both of them. After Lewis's father is killed in a tractor accident, he decides to take over the family farm--a fatal error, as it turns out. Leanne's son Will narrates the story, many years after the incidents in question, mingling recollections of his own sad life with incidents from his mother's. He explains how the free-spirited Leanne discovers too late that the prairie village of New Holland is inhabited mainly by staunch churchgoing farmers who rarely sing and never dance or smoke at all. The only roguish figure in town is Bobby Markum, pitcher for the local baseball club, and LeAnne takes to him like a drowning swimmer to a life preserver. Bobby and LeAnne manage to be discreet for a while, but eventually everyone knows. The inevitable catastrophes ensue. Bauer succeeds in portraying the inner lives of his characters with extraordinary clarity and precision, but he somehow fails to extract much genuine drama out of such evidently dramatic scenarios. His overwrought prose doesn't help. And the narrative device of concentrating largely on events that took place during one brief period of Will's youth gives a more maudlin than mature air to the proceedings. Precious and overdone. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finding a Place, and then Losing It,
By majennings@net1plus.com (Groton, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Book of Famous Iowans (Hardcover)
Jumping into The Book of Famous Iowans is jumping into a landscape--a farm that becomes so familiar that you undertand the loss the main character feels when you, like he, finish the book and leave it. Bauer is able to captures the wildy varying feelings of a young boy, his grandmother, his father, his mother, and her lover, designating no favorites among them. It's a true life story, showing how nothing, and everything, happens in a small town...how we who come from small towns can never leave them, and why we search for glimpses of them in well written books like this. If you like Wallace Stegner, Doris Lessing, and Ian Frazier, you'll like Doug Bauer.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Can't Get This Book Out of My Mind!,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Book of Famous Iowans (Hardcover)
I've read the other reviews posted here including the Kirkus diss. What troubles me about this novel is that it is so true--what the boy feels, what his father feels and how he is unable to say it, how his mother feels and is unable to act it out, and how his friend Bobby feels. That's a minor miracle of writing. I too thought of Madison County, but this is real literature, not a romance to cry over. I identify with the boy, as many of us must, and it's too bad that the author doesn't give us a mother who at least would contact her son in later life, having declared to her husband that she was taking him away. But that's not an essential plot point. Bauer gets inside the skin as well as the head. His use of words, his sentences, his writing style, have been banging around in my head for week. Read it and see for yourself.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Adult reminiscing gets in the way of the boy's narrative.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Book of Famous Iowans (Hardcover)
I am mystified as to why The New York Times raved over this novel. Though the author has a nice sense of place, he incessantly injects the dull reminiscing of the adult Will into what should have been a compelling story of the summer his family fell apart. He'll put in an aside to the effect of: "And though I didn't realize it at the time, the way my father told that joke at the restaurant was an indication of a side of him we didn't often see, and now I understand that . . ." Blah, blah, blah. Get on with the narrative, already! It also strikes me (as the mother of 2 boys) as extremely unlikely that this mom who loved him through childhood and into adolescence would desert him and disappear without a trace. A disappointment.
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