Customer Reviews

Finding Caruso

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Finding Caruso is a rare find - a book that carries you with it using both empathy and a clear hard eye on its characters. This book about two brothers, told by the younger brother Buddy, is about things lost along the road to growing up - in this case a literal road out of the shack in Oklahoma where the two brothers lived with a drunken abusive father and a shadowy suffering mother whose only offering is extra sugar in their tea when they suffer a beating, a heartbreak, a loss. Lee's way with a guitar and the ladies may take the brothers to LA and success some day, but this book is about the long stop the two make in a logging and mill town of Idaho. But as the title implies, this book is also about the things one finds even as one is letting things - and people - go. Loss is not simple, nor are the bonds that hold the brothers together - bonds that are at some times too binding and at others too loose and at times, all they have in the world. An older beautiful woman named Irene threatens to come between, as does the potential for Lee to be a big star and move on from the people in Idaho who have given them a start in life - the bar owner and bartender and band. When Irene chooses younger Buddy over Lee, it allows Buddy to see himself for the first time as someone with other options than playing the role of baby brother, of being a nobody son of a drunk farming cotton in the dust, destined to dead end jobs and deadened loves. For the first time he considers not just a limited life in which he must hide but a world in which he can act and grow. But her love is complicated by a hidden past, including an Indian friend accused of murder of a woman in Lee's band.
The progression of the tale is masterly - supple language combines with hard luck to create a story that draws one in. Buddy and Lee are characters we care about and believe in, even when we can see them hurting each other or acting foolish. Even their blindness to their own actions rings true. Minor or side characters are, with a few rare exceptions, fully drawn with a few lines or actions, so that one can almost smell the combination of stale smoke, Jack Daniels and soured dreams on the page. Irene is presented as the most complex character and is a bit more problematic. Her dialogue is far more stylized than the others, which marks her clearly as an outsider, but I often found trying to hear someone speak like that in my head would ring flat and affected. Her beauty and mystery attract Buddy, and provide much of the emotional heart of the story, but some of her actions towards the end feel forced into the plotline. Her character as written is both compelling and incomplete.
This first time novel by memoirist Kim Barnes is a real find!

This is a beautiful book: the writing is stunning, always smart and always insightful. And it is a great story, the story of a young man whose love affair with an older woman provides him with a way to live the rest of his life. It's a book about choices and possibilities. It's a book about doing the right thing and believing that it matters. It's a book that shows us, and Buddy Hope, its main character, that there is a way to be a happy, ethical human being in this complicated, often unfair, but beautiful world of ours. FINDING CARUSO will often leave you breathless. You might cry as you read, but you will also surely laugh. And you will not likely read a better novel any time soon.

This novel is so beautifully written and well-characterized that I tend to want to ignore the problems with the plot. The Hope brothers and their compatriots are perfectly drawn, and Barnes exercises her usual poet's touch with the Idaho countryside. Even the animals are well-realized (I love that so much in a book, when a writer gets animals right). Irene, however, remains a boy's fantasy object, overly sexualized and under-explored, and the plot is a recursive muddle. How many circles can a reader be asked to trace in one book? The tragedy at the center remains unresolved, in my opinion, and Irene's actions are melodramatic and unbelievable. I enjoyed the book, even so, and fans of Barnes' memoirs will want to read it for the pure pleasure of her prose.

It's 1957. Seventeen-year-old Buddy and his older brother Lee strike out for Idaho after losing their parents in an Oklahoma car accident, caused by their drunken father. They had a hardscrabble life to that point, and things wouldn't get better soon. In Snake Junction (a fictional Lewiston, Idaho), Lee finds work as the lead singer of a bar band. Meanwhile, Buddy mostly mopes around doing little until he meets Irene, a woman 12 or 15 years his senior.

Barnes' book is a coming of age novel; the story of an awakening mind. We suffer with Buddy. We feel his poison ivy itch, the blows he takes and we hurt when he rubs his feet raw in shoes two sizes to small. We know he's going to take just about every wrong turn he can take along his learning road. We know Irene can only end up hurting him. But what will knowing Buddy do to her?

Barnes was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her first book, the memoir In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country. That's an impressive start. Two things come to mind whenever I think of Kim Barnes. First, she tells the truth and writes from experience. Second, I learn something every time I hear her speak or read her work.

I listened to the audio version of this. The narration was well done, but come on producers. I can understand screwing up the name of the little Idaho town of Lapwai, but surely someone in the studio knew how t pronounce Spokane.

This is a beautiful book: the writing is stunning, always smart and always insightful. And it is a great story, the story of a young man whose love affair with an older woman provides him with a way to live the rest of his life. It's a book about choices and possibilities. It's a book about doing the right thing and believing that it matters. It's a book that shows us, and Buddy Hope, its main character, that there is a way to be a happy, ethical human being in this complicated and often unfair world of ours. FINDING CARUSO will often leave you breathless. You might cry as you read, but you will also surely laugh. And you will not likely read a better novel any time soon.

This is a beautiful book: the writing is stunning, always smart and always insightful. And it is a great story, the story of a young man whose love affair with an older woman provides him with a way to live the rest of his life. It's a book about choices and possibilities. It's a book about doing the right thing and believing that it matters. It's a book that shows us, and Buddy Hope, its main character, that there is a way to be a happy, ethical human being in this complicated, often unfair, but beautiful world of ours. FINDING CARUSO will often leave you breathless. You might cry as you read, but you will also surely laugh. And you will not likely read a better novel any time soon.

I'm moved to write a "review" like this for two reasons: first, FINDING CARUSO is an exceptionally fine novel; and 2) the reviewer from "Philadelphia" is not only wrong, he/she seems almost vindictive, certainly mean-spirited. He/she has posted the same review on BN's site. You might say it's lazy not to write a new review, but it figures, since the Philadelphia reviewer's also a lazy reader.

The story of FINDING CARUSO takes place in 1958, mostly in Idaho, though it begins in Oklahoma, where Buddy Hope, the narrator, and his older brother, Lee, find themselves suddenly orphaned. They have few options and fewer marketable skills, so on another's advice, and at the flip of a coin, they strike out for Idaho, where there are rumored to be jobs. What they find is the town of Snake Junction and a very special bar called The Stables, where Lee becomes a local star singing in a country band. It's at The Stables that they find Irene Sullivan, a beautiful red-head, who's a little older than Lee and twice seventeen year old Buddy's age. Irene's running from her past too, but she's a strong, powerful woman who cannot abide injustice. She also falls in love with Buddy. He matters to her. But things, as they do in novels, get complicated, and Buddy comes to learn that there is more to life than drinking, brawling, and going along with the dominant redneck reality. There's Caruso, there's wine. There's real love and what it means.

It's the injustice of the arrest of the Indian Wolfchild, for murder, that sets in motion what is this novel's crisis. That the "reviewer" from Philadelphia would find Wolfchild's arrest, in Idaho in 1958, hard to believe is sort of breathtakingly dim-witted: it's like believing the police would never arrest an innocent black man in 1960 Philadelphia. Racism was and is a regular and cancerous presence in places like Idaho (I lived there a long time; I know), just as it is in about 49 other states.

Irene teaches Buddy, among a whole host of other important lessons, that justice can sometimes matter more than one's own feelings; that doing the right thing is not always doing what you want. Buddy also learns love, and he learns who he is and who he must become--for, and because of, Irene.

This is a novel that is wise and beautiful. It is exceptionally well-written. It's also, very often, seriously funny (the goat castration scene is hilarious). Buddy Hope is an irresistible young man, and Irene--well, I don't think you can read about her and not fall in love with her a little bit yourself. FINDING CARUSO deserves readers, and clearly it has reached a lot of them who are fine, discerning, lovers of the best books. And most of them, though alas not all, are also smart enough to see what's going on in the book. Read it yourself. You'll be glad you did.

Literary novels don't usually have horses on the covers, though sometimes they do. This one does. Exceptional literary novels don't usually feature both country & western music and opera, but this one does. And this literary novel is one of the most carefully structured and beautifully written books you will read this year. Guaranteed.

Buddy Hope has fled Oklahoma, where his father's drinking and abuse has finally resulted in a car crash that has killed him and his wife. So orphaned, Buddy, who is 17, and his brother Lee, who's 25, set out for the West, for anyplace other than where they've been most of their lives. Anything's got to be better than what they've known so far. That they wind up in a north Idaho mill town, where Lee, with his skills at the guitar, his fine voice, and his way with women, attains something like happiness (though with Lee you can never tell; if you're not happy in your heart, you're probably not happy in your skin)is no more than dumb luck. But sometimes dumb luck's the best kind. Especially, as it turns out, for Buddy. Buddy is at loose ends. He's smart, sensitive, feels like something's wrong, but all he knows is Oklahoma wretchedness and little else. He lives with Lee in the back room at the Stables (based on a real and REAL hot bar/nightspot in the 50s in N. Central Idaho), sneaks mistake drinks and walks in the canyon. He's bound for a mill job, maybe. Or worse. He's bound for the kind of oblivion his father perfected into misery.

But into Buddy's life and into Snake Junction comes Irene Sullivan, a red-haired, stop-traffic beauty (if you get through this novel and you're not in love with Irene, talk with your doctor about . . . well, watch TV. You're hopeless) who's maybe twice Buddy's age. Irene's running from her past too, but unlike Buddy (and Lee) she's also sure about what matters in life--love and honesty and fairness. That's what she gives to Buddy: a real life. A life beyond willful redneck ignorance; a life where things like wine, opera, and fair play for people who aren't white is exactly the way it should be. She helps Buddy find Caruso--the singer and the horse. She helps him be the man who can be, not the man the world will allow. She's also the hero of this book. It's Buddy's version of the story, but Irene is the moral and ethical (and sensual) center of the book.

This story of Buddy, Irene, Lee, and the others in Snake Junction, as well as the voice it comes to us in (which is beautiful and skillful) is Buddy's. The whole novel comes to us as Buddy's memory. He's an older man doing the telling. And the skill with which he gives us the story has everything to do with what Irene gave him when he was 17. For if you can see there's a world where doing the right thing matters (even sacrificing what you care for most in the process), then when you decide to tell your story, as Buddy does, you'll want to do it as carefully and passionately as Caruso sang an aria, as Hank Williams wrote about heartbreak, as a salmon swims for home. Buddy's voice is the sanest you'll ever hear, and among the most honest. And also probably among the most deeply wounded.

What Kim Barnes does is make it all connect. This is no careless, plot-fueled, hopeful screenplay acting like a novel (though if Hollywood's not as dull as we fear it is, someone will make a magnificent movie from this book). This is the sort of novel people long for. It will make you laugh and it will make you cry, and when you put it down you will know in your heart that, pretty soon, you will want to read it again.

And then you'll tell a friend about it too. It's that good.

If you enjoy not only a good story with an unusual setting, but an author who is a real wordsmith, try this book. Barnes chooses her words carefully, and in almost all situations they fit perfectly. The author becomes the 17-year-old main character, Buddy. She has the ability to watch people, especially men, and pick up the nuances of their gestures, speech patterns, and emotions. The details of the central Idaho setting are so real that you will feel you are walking through, and seeing, them. Although the main review (above) criticizes her as having confusing or unrealistic sub-plots, they are less that than almost surreal experiences crammed into a brief few months. Many of these experiences are the reactions of a headstrong, impulsive man/boy who is faced with big decisions. The only disappointing part is the ending where Barnes flips forward to a much older Buddy, as if to find a way to end the story, and then in the last paragraph reverts to the 17-year-old boy.

Note: I made some Mormon angry because of my negative reviews of books out to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews.

Your "helpful" vote is greatly appreciated. Thanks


A very short review is not necessarily a bad review. You don't want to re-tell the whole story. I try for the hook that will make a person want to read this book. In my opinion, you should read long reviews after you read the novel. Read a short review first.

I "read" this novel as a book on tape. Wow, what a find! This beautiful story should not be missed. Two brothers living in poverty on a ranch in Kansas in the mid-twentieth century move to Montana after their parents die. The ending is triumphant.