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3.0 out of 5 stars
Halpern succeeded in making me care about Cuzzy, January 4, 2011
This novel has been sitting on my shelf for several years, one of a quartet of books my daughter read in a January term class at Middlebury College, where Halpern teaches. The setting is a small town in the Adirondacks, where the townies struggle to make a living in the post-logging era while just up the road a new generation of robber barons are erecting enormous lodges in the exclusive woods first settled by the likes of J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt. The main character is Cuzzy Gage, an 18-year-old on a fast track to loserdom whose preacher father was carted off to the insane asylum when he was nine and whose mother died of an aneurysm a few years later. When the story starts, Cuzzy's homeless and unemployed, living in the woods with the help of a high-school honey and estranged from the mother of his infant son, a girl who pores over women's magazines and is ambitious to get out one day. The plot kicks in with the arrival in town of Tracy Edwards, a Manhattan English teacher who dropped out after the death of his best friend, a gay ethnomusicologist who seems to have died of AIDs, and is living in the dead friend's ancestral lodge while cataloguing his papers and writing a narrative of his life. Tracy hires Cuzzy to help him with the papers and in locating the dead man's tree house somewhere in the dense forested acreage of the estate. Ever so slowly, Cuzzy begins to blossom as the numbness of his tragic circumstances begins to wear off and his innate curiosity revives, with tiny tendrils of feeling unfolding and a slender stalk of intelligence growing toward the light. But the changes in Cuzzy inspire fear and rage in some of those he's leaving behind, which culminates in a hideous crime.
Although it has some problems, I quite liked this novel. Halpern succeeded in making me care about Cuzzy, and because his story is complete, the novel worked for me. However, Halpern leaves a bunch of loose threads, which many readers will find annoying. Why build up a viewpoint character and then simply drop her? Why introduce a plot device such as the tree house and fail to resolve it? Why create an unlikely friendship and leave it undeveloped? Why present a parable like the Good Samaritan and fail to follow through? This is a first novel, so such lapses aren't unexpected. But tying up those loose threads can be the difference between a good novel and a great novel, and an important lesson that every novelist must learn is the necessity of leaving out the great stuff that ends up going nowhere.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Halpern's book just falls off the cliff too early, and never recovers, November 15, 2007
I really, really wanted to like this. I didn't know what to expect, and I was eager for the book to go in many different directions. [Cuzzy, an 18 year old father going nowhere fast, meets a flamboyant, charasmatic educated drifter named Tracy, who sort of gives Cuzzy a job, while residing in his (we are lead to believe) lovers families home. A relationship ensues. To see what kind you'll have to read it] To say the characters were rushed, had no depth, and were frustratingly incoherent with the world around them, is an understatement. There really is no momentum, the plot doesen't go anywhere, and I don't think the author wanted it to go anywhere. The insert flap says the relationship between the two main characters is "the focus of scrutiny and debate". Say what? If the debate were from some ignorant, blue collar, beer guzzling neanderthals, well then it was stereotyping rather than scrutiny. Other than that there is no real conflict. Is there a clear difference?
The author however, really does a fine job keeping you on your toes, just when a reader's initial pre-conceived notions about a situation is about to ensue, she throws you in a complete whirlwind of ignorance, and voila, the not so ordinary, ordinary happens, for lack of a better phrase.
I don't really know how long it took Sue to write this, but clearly the conflicts could have been so much more engaging, and thoughfully written chapters could have ensued if Cuzzy and Tracy were more tangible. I felt betrayed as a reader as I wanted to be in Cuzzy's world so badly from jumpstreet, yet never managed to really sit shotgun, just sort of was window shopping.
I think the gester on Ms. Halpern to use geology, material science, etc, as from her other non-fiction books of the matter, and bring it into the pre-chapters as non-binding intro's was refreshing, and to have Cuzzy with really no aspirations or intellectual stimualtion, know so much about Nature, was very pleasing. However again, falling short on Cuzzy as a person I wanted to know, the knowledge he had of Nature was not very beliveable, and as a reader I so wanted to believe he would make more out of his life than trucking rubble perhaps and we are led to believe, even in the end that nothing will change for this young man.
Donna Seaman's statement that Halpern's gripping tale about life's myriad hardships astutely considers the dangers inherent in cross cultural exploration, is giving the book accolades which it CLEARLY does not deserve. Tracy's introducing Cuzzy to a world so foreign to him, was merely passe and out of context with trying to actually show Cuzzy could perhaps have an inherent interest in these things.
In closing, it started off really intriguing, then drops off and falls hard and never seems to find solid ground again. The ending, albeit very unexpected and refreshing in a sense, is rushed and dissapointing, and that was a real shame.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful first novel, hard edged Adirondack life, October 8, 2005
This review is from: The Book of Hard Things: A Novel (Hardcover)
I have been a fan of Sue Halpern's writing since Migrations to Solitude. I found this books as I searched this site for new works from authors I respect. My introduction to the book was as a reader of the reviews on this site.
I'll admit it, I was confused. How could Sue Halpern write so haphazardly or gratuitously as some reader comments suggest. I usd those reviews as guides through the book and found none of the disappointment one would anticipate after reading such negative stuff.
I'm no critic. I'm a reader, and I am also an Adirondacker of sorts. I think that what might have startled some readers is the gentle and flowing Ms. Halpern is not so gentle in this novel. It does flow well, in my estimation. What is missed is what makes her writing work time and time again, the quality that prevails in all her writing: honest portrayal of subject matter.
If you are looking to be swept away into bucholic bliss in a quaint Adirondack setting, run from this book. If you are looking for a compelling story that is so absolutely true to what life can really be like in a small Adirondack town, buy this book!
Sue caputures what is a particular lonliness and longing that casts its shadow as often as not on the youth of Adriondack towns living far from what most of us understand as community life. The characters, every one of them, are portrayed with honesty and can easily be found in almost any small, remote town. Not fun stuff, but the real McCoy.
She doesn't pretend for a moment to lead anywhere other than the theme of hardness, from the title to the various themes that set each chapter, she leads us to despair and hope and back again to the inevidible hardness that is created by not being able to get away.
Some were unhappy with plots undeveloped, for example the fact that the tree house goes unexamined after its miraculous finding. That wasn't,in my estimation, undeveloped or faulty. It was the undeniablilty of the randomness, the wandering of existence and circumstance of such a place.
The scary part for me is the absolute possibility of the brutalness of the ending of the book. It wasn't gratuitous or unnecessary. It was born of hardness, of the rigidness of boredom and the desire for excitement and change...just about any change in otherwise listless lives.
And as for the ending...don't forget, Cuzzy ends up knocking on that door (you'll have to read it to know where I am going). His time with Tracy was one of growth and even through the tragedy of a brutal loss of life he is lead to a greater knowledge of himself. To me, the ending can be taken two ways. One of a continued hardness,of Cuzzy capitulating to the hopelessness of isolation in a small town. But how I read it was as a positive ending. Cuzzy is willing to open up, to take a chance, to see that his life has meaning (thank you Tracy) and that maybe he can being those things he never would have discoveres without Tracy's presence to bear on his life and that of his family.
Buy this book. It is a good read. It is clear and well written. The juxtaposition of the beautiful Adirondacks with hard realities and the longings created by being so far removed from everyday America is an honest chronicle of desire and disaster. It could as easily have been called a documentary as a novel. Its power lies in what it reveals to any reader believing that the Adirondacks is only of beauty and peace. Great book.
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