Customer Reviews

Goodnight, Nebraska

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I'm not sure what I expected from this novel, but I can say for certain it wasn't much. Maybe because it sat on my bookshelf collecting dust for the past three years, and my excitement for it had all but disappeared. However, now that I've finally read it, I can say with confidence how wonderfully surprising Goodnight, Nebraska is! The writing is flawless, the storyline is compelling, the novel...simply perfect.

Tom McNeal's novel tells the story of Randall Hunsacker and his seemingly dysfunctional life. Beginning in Utah and the shooting of his mother's boyfriend, Randall gets another chance at life when offered free room and board and a spot on the high school football team in Goodnight, Nebraska. While there, in addition to being feared and admired by his teammates, Randall falls in love with Marcy Lockhardt, a beautiful and popular cheerleader. What progresses afterward is a slowly unfolding story of the love, loss, friendship, loyalty and betrayal experienced not only by Randall, but by those that surround him.

I was captivated by this novel and hated putting it down so I could work and sleep. Tom McNeal has captured the perfect small town tapestry, where everyone knows your business and nothing goes unnoticed. Teen angst is only one small part of this terrifically moving story. A novel of surprising depth and honesty -- I loved it!

Says the FBI agent investigating a murder on the Pine Ridge. He continues, "But you see, it's not flat at all." That's my reaction to this wonderful book. This book has the long view, eyepopping, like the sky overhead, and it has its shorts, up, down again, unexpected. I don't get some other comments as I read them here online. One says McNeal can't draw characters, that these are too broad...I can't believe it! I never cry when I read a book and I found myself crying several times during this novel, not because McNeal was ever melodramatic, or pulling my emotional strings, but because so many of the details were so right! Reactions to grief, reactions to the stark facts of death, reactions to love and attraction and fear, and gossip...I don't care what time people have to leave to get to the football game in Lincoln and that would probably be one detail that might matter to a Nebraskan, but I am one, and I was past caring. This is a real book, by someone I suspect is a very keen and caring listener, so generous it made my heart swell when he wrote so truely, and compassionately; it made me question my own reactions to the rural people I've known in my life, and judged. One reviewer here says that these kind of events would take generations; what do we have in the twisting evolution of characters' lives but those very generations? Those incidents can and do happen and I know they do because I've lived them.

To those who say this is not a novel, I say shame on you, especially if you are a writer. This book clearly follows the fates of Randall and Marcy, and if you don't realize how other characters come along for the ride in life, then you are not living. This novel is more real than most I've read in a long time....why? Because the writer knows that time is not always as linear as we want it to be, even as Lewis wants it to be, looking at the barest outline of Randall's life to that moment; we want to think so, but thinking so is only one element that is the downfall of Lewis's own marriage.

The shifting points-of-view show McNeal's compassion and his feeling, his genuine concern for his characters. No one in a small town really wants to know what a person feels inside, they want to know the plots and the incidents, hungry for tragedy and perversion, at times even making up what can't be known. In the face of the deepest secrets, the deepest tragedies, however, there is a spirit which rises over all of it, maybe the luckiest of us could call it grace. Tom McNeal write with a great deal of grace.

I read this book with two boys crawling all over me. I took breaks only to feed them, to cuddle or answer their barest needs, and once in a while, I looked over the pages to relish the love and joy I feel for them. This book prompts that kind of reflectiveness. It also kept pulling me right along. It may not be a typically plotted story, but it is the BEST I've read in quite a while.

You don't have to know anything about Nebraska to love this book. If you love "unfrayed" storylines (whatever that might be), read Danielle Steele. If you want to read about real people, with real feelings, real hearts, real tragedies, and real living among all of that, you will want to read this book. It is not a farewell at evening, or the leave-taking, that the title suggests, but a place you want to spend a few hours, a good night, Nebraska or anywhere else in the world with a beating heart.

Many of us will recognize the fictional town of Goodnight, located in the Nebraska panhandle somewhere between Chadron and Rushville near the Niobrara River. We grew up in, or have close ties to, a place just like it - some small town where the main forms of entertainment are the Friday night high school football games and pheasant hunting, and where folks get curious if you happen to be going down the street in a different direction than usual. Goodnight is where 17 year-old Randall Hunsacker is sent after his life turns wrong in Provo, Utah. Randall has two things going for him: he's a helluva free safety and a hard- working auto mechanic. And then Marcy Lockhardt, the most popular cheerleader, starts to pay him some attention. This novel is Randall's story, but it's also the story of a variety of people from the town, most notably the staid and successful farmer and his bored and disillusioned wife, who become Randall's in-laws. McNeal draws the setting and characters without ever hitting a wrong note. (The football game scene should draw chuckles of familiarity from small town natives.) And the more we come to know these people, the more we see a striking contrast emerge between the men, who find an anchor in routine, and the women, who long for a release from the monotony. McNeal examines his characters' weak spots. As Randall tells his wife, the weak spots are what define us. When that spot gets pushed and everything else about you falls away, what's left is who you are.

The treeless, rolling terrain of Nebraska's panhandle and an isolated small town are the setting for this novel, and the uncompromising harsh beauty of this landscape provides an environment for characters whose lives depend much on the ability to withstand solitude and isolation.

Randall, the young protagonist, contracts into a self-protective stoniness as he fetches up here on his own like a shipwreck victim. Marcy, the girl who becomes his sweetheart, strives for a hard-won personal independence from her hard-working farmer parents. Their late-night lovemaking and eventual marriage are an against-all-odds attempt to save themselves from being swallowed up by the indifference of the natural world and the conventional expectations of the small town world they inhabit.

What pleased me most about this book was how often it took unexpected turns. Given the explosiveness of young Randall's character, his insensitiviy, and his distrust of others, his growth to manhood, steady and responsible, is a welcome surprise. So is his loyalty to Marcy and his willingness to regard her as an equal in love and marriage, even letting her leave him for an adventure of her own in California. Her discovery of him asleep in his pickup, parked in the driveway at her apartment house, the smell of rural Nebraska still filling the cab, is a wonderful moment of the bond that holds them together and to their home.

Another long sequence in the novel describes a hunting party that grows progressively unnerving, as some of the more trigger-happy in the group get steadily drunker and more frustrated at the lack of game. There is an ominous threat of trouble as you follow them, page after page, and McNeal waits until much later in the novel to reveal the eventual dark deeds of the day, throwing Randall's future unexpectedly into question for a time.

I think this book compares well with Kent Haruf's better known novel "Plain Song." The landscape and setting are very similar; so are the themes and the evocative language; and the rural and small-town characters are drawn with equal depth, compassion, and psychological realism. I recommend both.

This one caught my attention while browsing and I have added Tom McNeal to my list of "must read" authors. The story was a good one, the characters interesting enough to want to learn more about them. However, the story struck me as somewhat oddly disjointed, I'd find myself really enjoying it and caught up in the character (i.e. the adventures of unhappy Dorothy Lockhardt), only to be abruptly thrown into an unconvincing tale of Marcy's hiatus in an unbelievably portrayed Los Angeles. Overall, the story was a good one and I would recommend it. Tom McNeal shows terrific promise and I look forward to his next effort.

"Goodnight" demands the reader engage with the book at every level. The characters are vital, flawed and at times immoral. They are so well-conceived that it compels the reader to make judgments about acceptance and forgiveness. The story goes well beneath the surface of each character and exposes the depths of this fictional town with surprise, wit and heartbreaking revelation. At the end of the story, when the reader realizes the remaining truth, it is a well earned triumph. This was a Book Club selection and it provoked great discussion among the members because the author, Tom McNeal, pushes the story without spoonfeeding the reader. The writing is sparse and beautiful. The characters are unforgettable. The setting of Goodnight is as deceptive as the flat Nebraska plains. Wonderful.

This extraordinary novel will force the reader to examine the premises of his/her life, to observe more closely the various communities in which we live, and to cherish those virtues which enable us to love and adhere to others. Having finished the book last night, I am still viscerally upset by the conclusion and nearly overwhelmed by the myriad of themes, allusions, and images Goodnight, Nebraska contains. The central characters are utterly believable, and their flaws cause their virtues to be even larger. Not only is this a novel about community, it is an exploration of family, solitude, love, betrayal, and redemption. That this is a first novel is even more extraordinary. You will remember this work for many many months.

I grew up in Gordon, Nebraska, a town only a few miles from the one depicted in Tom McNeal's book, "Goodnight, Nebraska". Of course the real name of Goodnight is Hay Springs. I am a published writer and I guess the reason for the name change was to ward off law suits if a fictional character in the book resembled a true person in too many ways. A good move, I think, because all the characters reminded me of someone I once knew in the panhandle of Nebraska. I found the characters to be well-defined and I really came to know them.

Obviously, with my background, I am very emotional about the sandhills, where the novel rakes place. And, because of this, my comments are biased. However, conversely, I can tell the readers who thought it would be depressing to live in the area, that just the opposite is true. The people are respectul and gracious and life in very "sane" and quietly peaceful. I thought this ambiance came through in the novel.

Technically, Goodnight is very well written and in some scenes beautifully executed. Also, O'Neal established the very important aura of suspense, "what is going to happen next?" throughout the book. This makes it hard to put down. As one other reader said, it compares with the Pulitzer prize winner, "The Shipping News".

I would love to see a sequal with Randall and Marcy's children facing problems growing up in this small town, especially since they would have to cope with the legacy left them by the grandparents.

Five stars simply does not cover the utter greatness of this book; mabye it is six, or seven stars! The way it is written is absorbing and the story is mindblowing. As I closed the book at the end I nearly cried, and I begged that I might find a sequel. I have never felt changed by a book before but now . . . . Please, read this book, it is like nothing else!

"Goodnight, Nebraska" could be the pseudonym of any small, mid-western town, so perfectly does Tom McNeal capture the lives and hearts of its denizens on the page. Though little new ground is covered, "Goodnight, Nebraska" is a wonderful novel, full of poetic language and deftly-turned phrases. With echoes of Faulkner and Welty, McNeal has managed to evoke the last bastion of America, its hopes and broken dreams, and the beautiful rhythm that meanders throughout. While the book jacket says that "Goodnight, Nebraska" is Randall Hunsacker's tale, in truth, Hunsacker is merely a rock dropped into a pond. The resulting ripples spread ever outward, affecting everyone's lives in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. This is one of those rare novels that begs a rainy day to be able to lose ones self within its pages.