The Cherry Pit [Paperback]

Donald Harington (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1989

A flamboyant, lascivious, comic novel about restoration and renewal, in which the protagonist returns to his hometown and encounters a life that is both instantly familiar and disturbingly strange. His journey back begins as a recovery mission, but then becomes a desperate search for, confrontation with, immersion in, and emergence from his lost past.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Acclaimed by critics as "an undiscovered continent" and "America’s greatest un- known novelist" Donald Harington is a brilliant creator of fictional worlds, rooted in his native Arkansas. His imagination is no less expansive than Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his language is rich in a uniquely American, southern idiom. Winner of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, and the Heasley Prize, we’re delighted to be publishing With, his thirteenth novel, as well as three new editions of other novels in the Stay More cycle.

Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1st Harvest/HBJ Ed. edition (February 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156168200
• ISBN-13: 978-0156168205
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,915,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Donald Harington was one of America's greatest writers of fiction. His fifteen novels have been called jubilant, lyrical, foxy, captivating, delicate, bawdy, playful, reckless, joyful, courageous. Set in the fictional hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas, Harington's stories blend myth, dreamscape and sharply observed speech and manners to depict a rich, eccentric, rural society. All fifteen novels--from the classic Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, to the redemptive Choiring of the Trees, the love story With and the concluding novel Enduring, published just two months before Mr. Harington's death-- are now available as The Complete Novels of Donald Harington, a must-have collection for all those who wish to read the very best, authentic, contemporary American writing.

"The quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary US letters." -Boston Globe

"Harington is hooked into the deepest traditions of storytelling, dipping his buckets directly into the well it all comes from, pursuing a literature dedicated not to documentation or self-expression, but to fascination, to lifting us out of ourselves and the dailiness of our lives -- to making our world again wondrous and large." --Los Angeles Times

"Totally satisfying... Harington reveres the most ordinary aspects of the lives of unexceptional people...he makes his joy infectious." --Time Magazine

Donald Harington (1935 -2009) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent nearly all of his childhood summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark dialect and the old tales told by local storytellers. He published his first novel in 1965, and fourteen more for a total of fifteen, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, loosely based on Drakes Creek. Acclaimed by critics as "an undiscovered continent," "America's Chaucer," and "one of the most powerful, subtle and inventive novelists in America," Harington was the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, and the Oxford American Lifetime Achievement Award.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You cant go home again, August 31, 2003

By 

Manola Sommerfeld (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cherry Pit (Paperback)

My edition has a great illustration on the front cover. A man is on a bridge overlooking a river. In his background, there are green hills, a church, farmhouses. The image reflected on the water, though, shows skyscrapers and a gilded dome. Such is Clifford's dilemma, For those of us who have a love-hate relationship with our hometown, this book is a must. The back cover of my copy speaks of restoration and renewal. To me the novel had more to do with coming to terms with your past. Cliff is in a sense overcome with nostalgia. He is on the brink of obsession with the way things used to be. He is soon to be 30, and is going through an early middle-age crisis. Always solution-oriented, Cliff goes back home in hopes to find answers to his questions, and even considers relocating there (even though he knows that is impossible). The novel narrates his adventures and misadventures during his time in Little Rock. He rediscovers who his true friends are, and in the process makes a few enemies. Most interesting is his relationship with Dall, his best buddy but a terrible racist. Clifford "converts" him by example, without trying, and the process sounds totally believable, when it would have been very easy to make it look like a fairytale. Cliff's relationship with Margaret, his high-school sweetheart and a very messed up woman, is also well explained. I have always had a friend back home who cannot stop telling me how great it is to still live there.

Although there is a lot of humor (the scene in the pool house had me in stitches), this is ultimately a serious novel, that shows how nostalgia is a mistake.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible!, June 20, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Cherry Pit (Paperback)

Harington has once again captured the very essence of life in the South. This story is an entertaining romp that, like all good comic novels, has a very serious side to it. I have never read a better exploration of the human need to have a place to call home. Throughout the entire book, Harington keeps you entertained with murderous, lascivious, and affable adventures that will have you laughing hysterically and pondering the meaning of life at the same time

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Magnificient piece of literature, April 17, 2007

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cherry Pit (Paperback)

My friends at Toby Press are doing literature a great service. They are re-issuing Donald Harington's first book, The Cherry Pit, while we wait on his 14th novel, Enduring, which has been delayed due to illness and a car accident injury. The cover may look different, but I am assured that the content was not changed for political correctness' sake. Originally published in 1962, the prose is only dated by its use of language and my knowledge of the state. I find what was considered radical and mind-blowing in the early '60s, is now rather tame material.

Clifford Stone is an assistant museum curator of "arcane Americana" in Boston. He has a fulfilling job and a rich wife, yet he longs to go back to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. Why? Cliff doesn't seem to know exactly why either. There's this need for home and comfort and familiarity. He sets about renewing old high school friendships and re-discovering a girl and a love he had forgotten.

In many ways, Little Rock is just how Cliff left it. A backward Southern town still wrestling with the issues of race, culture, and love. Cliff sees that right away and wants to go back to Boston, but the South has a hold of him, much like it holds those who grew up there. He can't leave right away, as much as he wants too. Little Rock is caught in that cusp that existed in the 1960s, that longing to hold onto the Old South of the pre-Civil War and the New South that was shaping after desegregation. And that is simply the themes of this magnificent piece of literature that has been saved from almost obscurity.

If you've never read any of Harington's works, now is the time. He recently received the Oxford American Lifetime Award for Contributions to Southern Literature...and rightfully so. "Entertainment Weekly" has called him "America's greatest unknown novelist."

As Harington takes his place among the great writers of Southern Literature, I find myself longing for home and eagerly awaiting the next novel. Get well soon!

Armchair Interviews says: Unique look at the 1960s.