Customer Reviews

A Country Called Home

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In Connecticut scholarship medical student Thomas Deracotte met, dated, and married wealthy Helen over the objections of her upper crust parents; her father being third generation Yale especially detested this scholarship student. Soon after they exchange I do, the couple in 1960 moves to a farm in Fife, Idaho where he is to open up a medical practice; the current local health care comes from a pharmacist.

Shockingly, Thomas delays starting his practice as he would rather work the land; Helen quickly misses her family and her New England upper class lifestyle as farm living is not the place for her. She becomes pregnant while Thomas hires teen Manny to work on the farm. Helen gives birth to Elise, but she soon wants freedom from her intolerant spouse and is lonely from the hours of nothing but motherhood; while her husband turns to drugs to alleviate his feelings of failure as a physician, as a farmer, as a husband, and as a father. She considers Manny for a fling and he is falling in love with her. However after a tragedy changes the family dynamics, Manny is more a dad to Elise while her biological father is deeper into drugs.

This is a dark family drama that looks closely at the 1960s and 1970s when youthful idealism turned to cynicism and disappointment; yet with Elise there is guarded hope for the future. None of the four lead characters escape the bleakness, which in some ways becomes overbearing when one traumatic event is followed by another and another until suddenly Elsie is a teenager. Still in spite of the overwhelming sense of negativity, Kim Barnes provides a poignant look at idealism without pragmatism.

Harriet Klausner

A Country Called Home is an exquisitely-told story of a couple who leaves behind a privileged life in Connecticut to carve out a hardscrabble existence in the Idaho wilderness. The novel begins in 1960 when Thomas Deracotte and his young, pregnant wife decide to buy a dilapidated farm on the outskirts of a small town. After a sudden tragedy, the family is left to pick up the pieces in an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, landscape. As the Deracotte's daughter spends her time riding horses and avoiding other children her age, Thomas Deracotte often turns to fly-fishing as an escape. This book's best passages describe the Idaho countryside, particularly the river running along the edge of the Deracotte's farm and its narcotic effect on the family's patriarch:
"Even after all the hours spent with a rod in his hands, each strike seemed a surprise rather than the end result of his studied experiment: the fly carefully selected to match hatch and season; the cast so nearly perfect that the feathered hook whispered down like a caddis dipping its wings; the placement at the lip of current just shy of stone; the rise and roll and set. He would bring the fish in, cradle it just below the surface, and rock it softly until it spasmed free."

This novel is deeply grounded in its western setting, which Barnes evokes with beautifully poetic prose. Despite her gift with landscapes, Barnes does not shortchange the human element of this story, and A Country Called Home is populated with sympathetic characters and several lively plot lines. Although the Deracotte's endure loneliness, death, addiction, and mental illness, their story is ultimately hopeful. It's rare to find such striking prose in a page-turner, but A Country Called Home has it all. The overall effect is a powerful book that feels like a classic already.

Written in almost florid language, this novel begins quietly but builds up steam and has a rapid and eventful conclusion. The rich language employed is evocative, poetic, but - for me at least - rather held up the narrative. As the story speeds up, some episodes appeared more padding than plot progression, but the overall effect is rewarding - believable characters set against a very well delineated landscape. I am keen to read more from this author.

Having read all the glowing reviews, I thoroughly expected to like this book. But instead I found it incredibly disjointed and lacking in plot development. The writing style is definitely good; the book is readable. But most of the characters take drastic acts with little or no motivation.

SPOILER ALERT

For instance, the husband's descent into drugs is completely abrupt and unbelievable. Perhaps if the story had been better told, I would have believed it, but as it was I wasn't sure why it happened: his stillborn son? wife's death? coincidence after being bitten by the rattlesnake? inability to deal with patients? any or all of the above?

Similarly, I found the daughter's anorexia completely unsupported by the story. We're introduced to a character at 17; she is somewhat neglected by her father, but always has been, and has been apparently well-raised by her surrogate father Manny. Nonetheless, in a span of a few pages she is attracted to a boy, gets pulled into his church, falls out with his church, is convinced by the pastor (somehow) that she needs to fast, develops severe anorexia and winds up in a mental hospital where she recovers as soon as she meets another boy who she likes. None of this is remotely believable, nor does it any of it follow from the first third of the book.

And Manny's motivations are never really explained. Are we really supposed to believe his entire life was arrested in development by a single sexual experience twenty years earlier? That he would be so puzzled by the behavior of the girl he raised he lets her slip into madness without a single attempt at intervention?

None of the individual stories make sense, and as a result, I had a hard time caring what happened to the characters. Barnes has a great narrative voice, but she needs to learn how to write a story.

The 2008 novel A COUNTRY CALLED HOME by Kim Barnes tells of a doctor and his beautiful, pregnant wife who move from Connecticut to a rundown backcountry house by a river in a mountain canyon in northern Idaho. They hire, in exchange for board and a room in an outbuilding, a young handyman, Manny, who is self-reliant, competent, even tempered, and unassuming. Dr. Thomas Deracotte would rather fly fish than get his doctoring practice going in the tiny town a few miles up the road. Helen, his wife, doesn't mind simple country living, but not so simple that they can do without income, and she could use more attention and less isolation.

The first plot twist comes when Helen gives birth at home to boy and girl twins. The boy newborn is too small to survive, and his father the doctor can't save him. Dr. Deracotte then seeks even more the solitude of the wilderness and of the river. Helen, caring for daughter Elise in the house miles from town, feels even more isolated. Manny the handyman is nice and helpful.

This threesome situation, kind of like a D. H. Lawrence novel, is developing interestingly when the plot twists again and the story becomes Elise's, raised motherless by Manny and, to a less extent, by her father in the isolated house. As a young woman, she is the image of her mother at that age. The plot takes more twists and turns, and in the end shows that it takes an aged pharmacist, a waitress, a handyman, a sweetheart, and a father--representing community and family--all with their own problems--to together save the lives of in labor Elise and her baby from a strange and dire predicament.

The novel is beautifully and masterfully written. It puts the reader right there, experiencing the pains and pleasures, shocks and contentments, choices and consequences of the characters, in relation to nature and to one another, in prose like a broth reduction, rich in each paragraph with description, action, and emotions. The story, with its motifs of the woods, the river, the isolated canyon, the thorns and brambles, and so on reminds me of traditional folk stories, except that it has no wicked witch or giant but rather only the river and faulty and noble humans.

This novel has flaws, such as a plot that to some degree is driven by coincidence and chance; extreme turns of fortune that seem at times to come with implausible frequency and speed, and the inherent disjointedness of making one story from two stories-- Helen's story and Elise's story, however effectively the author unites them by theme, motif, and resolution. But the strengths of this novel far outweigh its flaws, and I think that A COUNTRY CALLED HOME by Kim Barnes ranks with the best of American regional literature.

This is a well written book but not one that I would readily recommend. Depressingly dark, the characters slog through life side by side, occasionally touching, glimpsing just enough potential joy to sustain them. I am not sure that Kim Barnes meant it to be a commentary on society or simply the story of people who continue to seek despite having lost much.

At the heart of this disturbing novel set in the Idaho wilderness is the desperate hunger of its characters to escape ennui and emptiness--in short, to find love.

In 1960, Thomas Deracotte, a skittish physician, and his pregnant wife, Helen, a free spirit looking for adventure, leave their home in Connecticut and settle near the small town of Fife.

A young man named Manny becomes a hired hand on their fledgling farm. Numerous tragedies soon strike, but not according to the predictable formulas of run-of-the-mill romance fiction.

Fast forward to 1976 and the Deracotte's daughter, Elise, faces troubles of her own: "It sometimes seemed to Lucas [Elise's boyfriend] that every man's life was destined by violence done and received."

Written in beautiful poetic prose, A County Called Home is highly recommended.

About the author: Kim Barnes is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country--a finalist for the 1977 Pulitzer Prize--and Hungry for the World. She is coeditor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-five Women over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, MORE magazine, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

There are two components to a successful novel; those being poetic prose and an enjoyable plot. "A Country Called Home" has much of the former and none of the later. This book was an organized drear from beginning to end, as if the author suffers from severe depression and wanted to give us all a taste. Well written, yes, but I've seen well written materials in an owners guide for a oven/range I bought once. This will be the last time I pick up a book strictly because it promises mountain views and trout fishing. If you pick it up, I suggest you fill your wellbuetrin prescription first.

This somewhat difficult-to-read novel was a very sad story, but beautifully rendered. Loving writing about Idaho...its wilderness and one of its small town.

I just finished this book. You know when I sit down mid-day and read it is a book I like! Although "like" may not be the correct word for such a sad and dark story. And gritty would be another good descriptor.

I had put off finishing the book until late afternoon because I was afraid of how it was going to end. But the author managed a sensitive and meaningful ending --- without neatly tying up all the ends into a package. We feel the characters' sorrows but do not wallow in them.

My only complaint is that the characters could have been more well-developed - I did not really feel that I "knew" them or their motivations...except that all were searching....for something.

This book's best asset is how it gives the reader a sense of place. On the other hand it is weak when it comes to character motivation and plot. This is a group of characters that is very hard to connect with or care about.