The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tom Bailey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 18, 2005

On the edge of the Adirondack wilderness, survival is a way of life for the Hazen family. Gary Hazen is a respected forester and hunter, known for his good instincts and meticulous planning. He and his wife, Susan, have raised their sons to appreciate the satisfaction of this difficult but honest life. In spite of this, the boys, men now, are slipping away. His older son, Gary David, is secretly dating a woman of whom his father would not approve even as Kevin, the younger boy, struggles against the limits of his family’s hardscrabble lifestyle, wanting something more. On the first day of hunting season the Hazen men enter the woods, unaware that the trip they are embarking on will force them to come to terms with their differences and will forever change their lives.

In The Grace That Keeps This World, Tom Bailey gives us an emotional page-turner, infused with a deep sense of foreboding. Alternately narrated by the Hazens and their neighbors in Lost Lake, the story perfectly captures the enduring rhythms of life in a rural town.

The Grace That Keeps This World is an October, 2005 Book Sense pick.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This accomplished, moving first novel (after Bailey's collection Crow Man) is about fathers and sons, tough love and compassion, the bonds of community and the solace of belief. Gary and Susan Hazen are natives of Lost Lake, a hardscrabble town in the Adirondacks, high school sweethearts who have raised their two sons on the satisfaction of living off the land. At this suspenseful narrative's outset, Susan recollects a fateful day, the start of deer hunting season, hinting that some tragedy has struck her loving but combustible family. Gary is a highly principled and respected woodsman and hunter, but his self-righteousness brings him into conflict with his sons. Both young men have secrets that will strain the family fabric, and together father and sons weave a tangle of intention and circumstance that will culminate in an act that will test their power to survive. Alternately narrated by the Hazen family and members of the community, the novel sustains an elegiac tone even as events rise to a dramatic denouement. This novel has the validity of deeply felt truths and characters who are bound and motivated by a love that arches the chasm of divergent ambitions and desires.
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Gary Hazen lives with his wife and two grown sons in the Adirondacks, close to the Canadian border. They spend their days cutting trees, growing vegetables, and hunting for animals. Gary tries to keep his family together by providing for them as fathers have for centuries. Holding on to traditions and his own high standards, he expects them to do the same despite the many conflicts both internal and external affecting their lives. This exquisite novel centers around one event: opening day of deer-hunting season. An annual ritual for the Hazens, this important occasion determines how well they will eat during the harsh winter to come. When the younger son, a college student, decides not to participate in this years hunt, his father becomes enraged and hits him, prompting Kevin to move in with his pregnant girlfriend on campus. In the meantime, the newly hired environmental conservation officer is determined to catch Gary illegally bagging an extra deer. Each chapter, written from one of the Hazens viewpoints or those of other characters impacting their lives, builds up to the final tragedy as foreshadowed in the prologue. Vivid descriptions of the natural environment are abundant in this beautifully written first novel. A profoundly emotional experience, the story will hook readers.–Pat Bender, The Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, PA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books (October 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307238016
• ISBN-13: 978-0307238016
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #773,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting family drama, October 22, 2005

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel (Hardcover)

Adirondacks forester Gary Hazen believes he lives the good life with his beloved wife Susan, and their two sons twenty-four year-old Gary David and nineteen year-old Kevin because he loves the outdoors. He firmly believes his family feels the same way.

On a hunting trip in the mountain wilderness near their Upstate New York home, Gary begins to wonder if perhaps his younger son does not like the life of a woodsman. Whereas Gary David seems the heir apparent to him, college student Kevin wants to be a teacher and refuses to join them on the hunt as he promised his girlfriend he would not. Meanwhile new environmental conservation officer, Josephine Roy has warned Gary and others that she will enforce all the state hunting rules that guys like him have ignored over the years. Josephine and Gary David have a relationship, but Gary's son fears telling his dad that he is sleeping with the enemy. The potential family schism comes to a tragic head on the first day of the new hunting season.

Turning Kahil Gibran's message of parents letting their children go on its head, Tom Bailey provides an interesting family drama that is somewhat difficult to follow due to an abundance of narrators (a baker's dozen at least). The character driven story line focuses mostly on the inner tensions between the Hazens, but has sidebars narrated by others that seem out of place. Tom Bailey puts the Adirondacks setting to strong use in order to display the differences between the generations and when it concentrates on the Hazens it make for a fine tale of personal conflict.

Harriet Klausner

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A self-reliant Adirondack family's crucible, March 9, 2007

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K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel (Paperback)

Tom Bailey's new novel about Mississippi race relations in 1944, "Cotton Song," has just been released. I hope that those who discover Bailey as a writer for the first time through that book will backtrack to this, his first novel.

"The Grace That Keeps This World" lovingly and luminously lays out the hard lives of the Hazen family who live in the middle of the Adirondack Park. Susan Hazen, wife and mother, alerts us in the prologue to unspecified tragedy that the Hazen father and his two sons will meet on the first day of deer hunting season. Then, the novel delves into the week before opening Saturday, shifting with each chapter between first-person perspectives (with one third-person exception) of family members and other residents of their rough-hewn community. Bailey portrays the reticences, the secrets, the fissures, the pride, the faith (religious and otherwise), the stubborness, and the concealed love that eddies between these characters. Twenty-first century readers are reminded that some folks still live rugged lives off the land; lives that count on the meat from antlered bucks brought down. The Hazens don't hunt for wall trophies. They don't waste a sinew of carcass. But the choice of the parents doesn't necessarily carry to the next generation. Sons Gary David and Kevin have to decide whether they will cleave to their strong-willed father's frontiersman-like expectations that his sons will work with him in their adulthood, or whether they will live more modernly and out of his shadow. The suspense builds over when and how they might declare independence. Will a huge family crack-up ensue because of "revolt" by the sons? Or will destinies and vantage points be forestalled and altered by the fateful opening day?

"The Grace That Keeps This World" is a work of aching depth and beauty. Although the the tragedy and its aftermath could have been elaborated upon, and there were other, earlier places in the novel where characters were too economic with conversation, this is a book that remains with the reader. Images of Susan Hazen in her kitchen or garden, of Gary Hazen chain-sawing thick limbs for winter heating or worshiping in the front pew at church, of Gary David tip-toeing around downstairs to keep from waking his mother at an unearthly hour, and Kevin practicing his memorized recitation from "The Odyssey" or wallking toward shots heard on the hunt don't fade away easily. The heart feels keenly the humanity, the fallibility, but also the grace, in these pages.

Four and a half stars.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the Wait, December 5, 2005

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Janet Hawbaker "Momma Music" (Chambersburg PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel (Hardcover)

I first heard Tom Bailey read the short story, upon which this novel is based, to the parents of his writing students at Susquehanna University. Five years have passed since that day - the day when I began waiting for him to turn the story into a novel. Tonight I finished reading the novel. It cannot be put down until you have read it in its entirety. The Grace That Keeps This World was definitely worth the wait!