Faraway Places (Hawthorne Rediscovery) [Paperback]

Tom Spanbauer (Author), A. M. Homes (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Hawthorne Rediscovery | Publication Date: March 17, 2008

During a fateful summer, 13-year-old Jake Weber witnesses the brutal murder of a Native American woman by the town banker. Jake's parents forbid him to speak of the killing or name its perpetrator, even as the woman's African American lover stands falsely accused. The crime and what follows it forever alter Jake's view of his parents and the world around him. Faraway Places won widespread praise for its vivid narrative and incantatory style, and Spanbauer displays singular skill in inhabiting the mind of a troubled adolescent boy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The soft caress of a February chinook across harsh Iowa fields sets the tone of this finely wrought first novel about events occurring in Jake Weber's early adolescence. The observant and solitary only child of a taciturn father and quiet, religious mother, Jake disobeys their injunction against swimming in the river and, in doing so, witnesses the murder of a local Indian woman by Harold Endicott, who owns the mortgage on the Weber farm. Jake tells his parents what he's seen, but his father insists they say nothing, even as the woman's lover, a black man, is accused of the crime and flees. That summer, Jake sees the black man at the state fair and by speaking to him begins to make amends in his own heart. Soon after, Jake's father loses the farm and, in a drunken rage, accosts Endicott. The black man and Jake rescue the youth's father and, with the help of Endicott's five Dobermans, wreak their own revengebut at great personal cost. Balancing Jake's sensitivity against the harsh reality of farm life in the '50s, Spanbauer tells his short, brutal story with delicacy and deep respect for place and character. Forceful and moving, this novel is a promising debut.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Hawthorne Books; First Edition edition (March 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976631180
• ISBN-13: 978-0976631187
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #538,072 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely!, June 22, 2001

By 

dampscribbler (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Faraway Places (Paperback)

Jacob Joseph Weber is 13 years old, and his eyes are seeing things in ways he's never seen them before.

In 125 pages, Spanbauer tells the story of Jake's journey from boyhood to manhood in a time and place where being a man seems to mean making all the right mistakes. Jake sees truth in places his father no longer can, but in the process of opening his own eyes, he may be helping his father see, as well. See the cruelty of his assumptions, the reality behind the illusions that are all around.

"It was all an illusion, like Mr. Energy, that magician at the Blackfoot State Fair, said. Everything was an illusion according to him. I used to get scared at night just thinking about it: what if everything -- everything that was familiar to me, everything I knew -- was an illusion and what I was really doing was hanging in thin air, like the earth was hanging in thin air, like I could see the moon hanging up there in the sky, a round ball just out there with nothing solid to hold it in place." (p. 13)

This is Spanbauer's first novel and is a lovely introduction to his writing, his mind, and his style. It's a quick read without some of the difficulties of "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," but still an elegant look at a moment in a boy's life when he shrugs off the cloak of childhood and does what comes next.

Rumor around Portland has it that this book will be re-issued later this year.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Where Tom began, October 15, 2008

By 

Nicholas R. Demartino "Nick D" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Faraway Places (Hawthorne Rediscovery) (Paperback)

I first read Spanbauer's MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MOON 10 years ago and fell in love with him, especially his unique voice. Recently, to prepare to take his famous "Dangerous Writing" workshop, I ordered FARAWAY PLACES, his first novel, really a novella, reissued in a gorgeous edition. The story explores themes of racism, rural poverty, identity, and family-imposed secrets and shame. Like all four of his novels, the central character is an outsider in plain site, in this case, an Idaho farm near Pocatello... which is similar to all of Tom's novels, except THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE...

There are echoes of Steinbeck in the elegiac relationship to a changing rural landscape, the reverence for nature. Characters are sharply drawn, and Tom crafts sentences like sacred objects.

This first novel only begins to hint at the scale of Spanbauer's narrative ambitions, realized successively in the three novels that follow, all of which are more complex, more panoramic in scope. But thematically and stylistically, this is where it begins.

Highly recommended. In the context of the contemporary struggle over race in American life, this brings us back to the brutal reality of our history, which is pretty strong medicine, as well.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Moving Coming Of Age Novel, August 21, 2006

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Faraway Places (Paperback)

In Tom Spanbauer's short first novel, the narrator is Jacob Joseph Weber who is thirteen and enters junior high about half way through the story. He and his parents live on a farm in Wind River, Idaho, a farm that the evil Harold Endicott , holder of the mortgage on their land, forecloses on in October of the year (early 1950's?)after the Chinook ("the name for the strangae wind blowing") struck in February. The Weber family's life is grim as they are fettered by both poverty and the shackles of a severe Catholic Church; they are not nearly as bad off, however, as "that woman Sugar Babe," an Indian woman and the black man who lives with her.

While Spanbauer notifies the reader early on, through the voice of Jacob, as to the multiple tragedies that happen, the narrator, as you would expect from a youngster recalling such events, skips from here to there until his story is finally told.

Jacob is a youngster grappling with his budding sexuality-- he nightly "yellows" his shorts and of course has to confess his sins to "Monsignor Canby about every occasion." His transgressions, however, are miniscule compared to the violence and evil, even murder, that he confronts at such an early age.

One of my favorite passages is Jacob's account of his family's going to the state fair when every year his parents picked that day to be mad at each other--"be mad and stay mad. . . What got different when my mother and my father were mad at each other was the world; everything and everybody else was a little off--a touch cantankerous, and full of bother. . . Everybody drove like they were from Utah." Surely every child has experienced something similar when his parents are angry with each other.

FARAWAY PLACES-- the title comes from a Perry Como song-- is extremely well-written with not one wasted word, a harbinger of what is to come from this fine writer.