David Shetzline was part of the brilliant circle at Cornell University in the early 1960s which also included Thomas Pynchon and Richard Fariña. DeFord, his first novel, was published to great acclaim in 1968, but fell into obscurity after Shetzline abandoned fiction in the 1970s to raise his family. Now this lost sixties classic is available again for a new audience. DeFord, an aging carpenter and outdoorsman from the West, is felled by a heart attack on a visit to New York and finds himself trying to survive in the urban wilderness of the Bowery. As he tries to recover, he recalls the freight-train-hopping, lumberjacking, campfire days of an earlier American era, while learning how to stay alive and make new friendships in a very different present.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
An aged Oregonian carpenter visiting New York City is stricken with a heart attack that forces his stay in the notorious Bowery. For much of the novel, it seems that Shetzline's "characters and symbols may come together in the sort of universality he is obviously seeking," PW suggested. "They don't quite, but they come awfully close."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
In DeFord, a septuagenarian from a long line of losers is passing through New York City when he is felled by a sudden heart attack. Recuperating in a fleabag hotel, he is beset by a deformed Indian named Joe Raven who, having stolen DeFord's pension check, dogs his footsteps trying to get the old man to sign it over to him. DeFord enlists a drunken painter to help him recover the check. As the painter leads him through the Bowery's seamy jungle of broken men, DeFord begins to reflect on what may be his first real attachments and last adventure in a long, peripatetic life. DeFord was written in the sixties, and sixties' spirit and style pervade it. Like Richard Farffia's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (DeFord is dedicated to the memory of Farifia), DeFord is filled with baroque characters who have been dropped onto a picaresque landscape. Some of the novel's situations haven't aged well, such as the relative ease with which Bowery bums mix with the elite New York art crowd. Characters often seem endlessly selfreferential, as well as improbably deep. But the machinations of Joe Raven and his crew to get DeFord's money are strikingly inventive, while DeFord's reveries are provocative and often beautiful. DeFord is recommended to readers, who like to immerse themselves in a novel's characters and are not daunted by an elaborate style. -- From Independent Publisher
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The importance of the earnest first novel.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Deford (Paperback)
Having known Shetzline slightly in Newport, Oregon, in the mid-'70s, I read both of his books, DEFORD and HECKLETOOTH 3, back then; and of the two, "3" is the better. Nonetheless, there are images, scenes, and conversations from DEFORD that a quarter century later still remain with me, such as Joe Raven's haunting description of his fall from the tall steel when he was an ironworker; the ploy Deford used for catching a huge, cannibalistic trout; and the way, in the end, guile overcomes force. In a sense, though, DEFORD itself is a guileless book, sometimes awkward, yes, but true and earnest in a way novels are not permitted to be anymore. Shetzline probably wouldn't make it into writing school today on the strength of a novel like DEFORD, but who really needs all that is put out by the writing schools, anyway? If you can find DEFORD, by all means read it. But search until you find HECKLETOOTH 3, because you must read it.
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