Customer Reviews

The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel

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

 

 

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

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.

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!

Lost Lake (based on Long Lake, a sparsely populated area of the Adirondacks in upstate New York) is a quintessential small town. Everyone knows each other, eats at the same diner, drinks at the same pub, and prays at the same church. It is cold for most of the year and people hunt for survival. Certainly, the town attracts tourists and your occasional celebrity --- a redhead named Blaze Farley --- but there are no chain stores to be found.

At the center of this novel is the Hazen family. Gary is a logger and hunter who believes in living simply and off the land. He grew up in Lost Lake and is married to Susan, his high school sweetheart. Susan is a dutiful housekeeper and loyal to her husband and two sons, even when she disagrees with them. Gary has brought up his sons the same way he managed to train any dog he had, "with a biscuit in one hand and a switch in the other." Their younger son, Kevin, is a hotheaded college student with a girlfriend who disapproves of hunting. He also has ambitions that extend beyond Lost Lake and spars with his dad as a result. Gary David is older, gentler and more easygoing, but he too fears disappointing his father. Susan and Gary have a loving relationship, but she is clearly no match for her husband's powerful presence. Therefore, she is not able to mediate between Gary and Kevin.

The opening day of buck hunting season is in October and is the biggest day of the year at Lost Lake. It is usually already cold by then, and this year the weather forecast is predicting snow. It is a Hazen tradition for Gary to go hunting with his sons, but this year there's tension. Bailey takes the reader through a chronology of events that occur the week before opening day and the tragic events that change the Hazens' lives forever.

Narrating this story are the Hazens and their neighbors: Officer Josephine Roy, the local Environmental Conservation Officer who is investigating Gary's hunting tags (there is a limit on how many deer you can hunt per year) and is having a secret affair with Gary David; Captain Talbert, Officer Roy's boss; Brad Pfeiffer, a retired ECO and Gary's best friend who reluctantly moved to Florida; Lucy Pfeiffer, Brad's wife who is brazen and crass; Val, the co-owner of Lake View Diner; Anne Marie Burke, a waitress at Lake View who always thought she would settle down with Gary David; Father Anthony, the local priest who is good friends with Gary and has heard his confessions of when he served in Vietnam; Armound Pollon, a fellow logger who only cares about money; and Lamey Pierson, a woodsman who is the town outcast.

All of these viewpoints give a panoramic view of the town and the conflicts of one family. Although some of the characters have predictable traits, they are never stereotypical. But the sheer number of narrators makes the novel seem disjointed, and some key points, like Gary David and Josephine Roy's relationship, are underdeveloped. Other subplots, such as a local independent film about Canadian geese that Gary and Gary David work on, give insight to the Hazens' personalities but are slightly overdeveloped.

Tom Bailey, who cut his teeth as a short story writer, is adept at describing everyday life and routine activities. Whether it's the melee at the diner or the pub, doing household chores, driving by the lake and appreciating the town, or attending the weekly mass, Bailey examines his characters through their actions.

As the tragic events unfold, the central characters come together, united by some keen sense that something is terribly wrong. The end of the novel is a bit rushed, though, and some of the conclusions seem a little convenient. Nonetheless, Bailey has written a unique and engrossing first novel.

--- Reviewed by Jane Van Ingen

Tom Bailey's debut novel is chilling-both in story, conception, and writing. The plot is already detailed on Amazon so I'll spare the recap. Bailey masterfully weaves different voices throughout this book and creates a beautiful sense of what it's like to live in a small town. Examining the Hazen's from several different angles, we get a true sense of the family and those around them. When I finished the book, I felt the wind knocked out of me-there is a quiet, emotional wallop any fan of fiction will admire. And for any writer, read Bailey's prose for many reasons. I was most impressed by his muscular sentences. This is an impressive work and all of us should wait eagerly for the next.

Winters in the North Country can be tough; the Hazen family knows this better than any one else. Having lived in the area for years, Susan and Gary Hazen recognize the score, their aim during the year to prepare for the season's first big snow. There's even a contest in the local café, the winner, the one who predicts when the first cold front will come sweeping down through Canada bringing with it frigid temperatures.

Life for these families who live on the edge of Lost Lake, in the Adirondack wilderness is one of survival, the knowledge ingrained that they must each work together, be organized, and also meticulously plan to get through the coming winter months. Gary Hazen, an experienced forester, deer hunter, and Vietnam Veteran, relies heavily on his two young sons Kevin and Gary David to ensure that they will have enough food stored; their ability to hunt and shoot deer, a necessity in this harsh and wild world.

Lately, however, his sons have been drifting away from him. Gary David is now twenty-four, and while he is still living at home, he is secretly dating a young girl, Officer Roy, with the intent to marry her. Officer Roy has just been promoted to the local Game Warden, and has recently been hounding Gary David about the legality of their deer shooting tags.

Meanwhile, Kevin is beginning to rebel; the scholar and the academic, the younger son is beginning to want something more than just partaking in the endless rounds of logging and deer shooting. He's become involved with Jeanie, a girl at his local school and she's lately been persuading him to stand up to his father and to think for himself, to be his own man.

While Gary David is intent provide their father with what he wanted, the purveyor of his father's bidding, practicing what his father preaches, and "wearing his fathers chosen life as if it were his own." Kevin is inspired by Homer's The Odyssey, which creates in him "a sudden soaring elation," the abrupt conviction that he wants to teach, to make something more of his life. As Susan remarks, "Kevin is young, has time to be young, to make choices about his future the way we never had the chance to make."

There's no doubt that Gary loves both his sons, but he's also a man who does what he believes is right for his family, a man who doesn't shrink from the rule of his own convictions. So when Kevin tells his father that he is not going to go on the up and coming dear hunt, Gary is appalled. Kevin reluctantly gives in and on the first day of the 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 alter their lives forever.

Told in alternating voices, author Tom Bailey has written an exquisite tale of remembrance, frustration, and ultimately loss. The characters are numerous and eclectic, each folding in on each other, telling this wilderness tale from vastly different points of view: There's Lucy and Brad Pfeiffer, a couple who have transplanted from Lost Lake to Florida, Lucy is glad to be away from the perpetual cold, but Brad misses the natural beauty of this harsh world.

There's also Lamey Pierson a fellow hunter, making good in the revenge he'd sworn against Gary Hazen for turning him in for poaching a doe; Armond Pollon, an upper lake Frenchman who with his team of clear-cutters represent the kind of newfangled forestry that Gary finds shortsighted and greedy, and there's Gary Hazen himself, whose staunch Catholic beliefs speak to him as a man who has tried his best to weigh the balance of his life by a strong set of convictions in the world.

In this novel, the lives of the characters constantly overlap, affecting each other in profound, and often-spiritual ways. These are people who live off the land and who live from day to day, always conscious of the financial constraints and the limitations placed on their existence. But they are a sturdy and resilient people, and there is something that binds them to this North Country, "a land of such peaks and forests and water - lakes and ponds and bogs and brooks, seasonal runoffs and the since time began flow of rivers."

Bailey manages to evoke the shear breathtaking beauty of the place - "of the silver water and the dark green pines and the mist blue mountains beyond in the dawn that stretched out so magnificently." But he also writes a riveting drama of husbands and wives, of fathers and sons, of a community that cannot help but hold together in adversity - their resolute and unyielding beliefs made manifest in the day-to-day workings of their lives. Mike Leonard November 05.

There is no pandering or flashiness here. This is a book about people who tend to keep their feelings to themselves as a way of being and a way of being with each other. Yet in each piece of the narrative, I could feel what they felt quite completely. The author captures much of what it means to be from rural parts of America: something I feel is not done well in many American novels. And I was struck by how beautifully he shows us how people who live in a world surrounded by nature develop their values for it.

This book was a great pleasure to read. In a time when materialism has gotten in our way, this clearly written, thoughtful look at a world that is simpler, more difficult and more "honest" was a great pleasure to read. As someone who is often disappointed with what's out there in the way of fiction, this novel did not disappoint -- not from the beginning. I hope Tom Bailey will write many more books in the future. This book is a treasure.

I'm not a critic. I've not written a novel. I'm not entering into a covenant with every book I read with a detailed checklist in hand about the various literary elements I may or may not find in the novel. All I ask is this: Did the book take me somewhere I've not been before? In the case of "The Grace That Keeps This World," yes, indeed. I have been to the North Country. All I know is this: Despite the cold, I wanted to stay.

I just finished listening to the unabridged audio book version read by the author. Stunning! What a writer! One of the best novels I have listened to. This is an intricately woven, moving story of family, friendship, love, and respect. Tom Bailey's unique style, telling the story from the perspective of so many characters is captivating and adds a richness to the story that one voice never could. Read by the author, this story comes alive. You can't walk away from it, Tom Bailey reaches out and grabs you, pulling you into the story, tugging at your heart in the end (have some tissue close by). ENCORE!