The Green Age of Asher Witherow [Hardcover]

M Allen Cunningham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2004

Rich in historical detail, this gorgeously written debut novel tells the story of a young soul coming of age during the boom and bust years of a California Welsh coal mining in the 1860-70s. M. Allen Cunnignham writes about a place at once gritty, yet magical. He captures an intimate connection between the characters and a sweeping landscape, where the future seems filled with promise but where a day's labor is bone breaking and dangerous.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A miner's son is immersed in the dark spirituality of an insular, mostly Welsh Northern California mining town in the mid-19th century in this gritty coming-of-age debut. When Asher Witherow is eight, he witnesses the burning of his best friend, Thomas Motion, in a horrific accident as the boys explore the caverns of nearby Mt. Diablo. Witherow hides his knowledge of the accident even as a search is mounted, a situation that intrigues Josiah Lyte, the boy's bizarre schoolteacher and local preacher who eventually gets cast out by the populace for integrating Hindu elements from his upbringing in India into his work. Much of the novel deals with Lyte's mystical influence over his precocious pupil, but some years after the accident Witherow also enters into an ill-fated romance with his "evening friend," Alice Flood. Cunningham does a superb job of capturing the grim rhythm of life in the mines, balancing that material with fine childhood character studies. Occasionally, the author gets carried away and the spiritual material turns lurid, but the beauty of Cunningham's naturalistic prose and the strong characterization of young Asher Witherow make this a worthwhile debut from a noteworthy new author.
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From Booklist

First novelist Cunningham writes no semiautobiographical coming-of-age story, but a thoroughly researched and accomplished historical novel. Its unusual structure and richly descriptive, evocative language display a mastery that is surprising in a novelistic debut. Although the plot follows Asher's early life in a largely chronological manner, the book's five sections ("Earth," "Blood," "Bone," "Ash," "Earth") define his life episodically and describe three disastrous events in his first 20 years. The narrator's voice-- wry, compassionate, and detached--examines, reviews, and interprets the actions and emotions of his invincibly innocent younger self. Memorable characters people the Nortonville, California, community, contributing texture and weight to the story. Most impressively, Cunningham depicts the rigors of life in a frontier mining town--especially the physical hardships--and the fragility of humans living in harsh conditions. The darkness of events and the elegance in structure and language will make this book satisfying to readers who enjoyed such books as Robert Morgan's Gap Creek (1999) and Annie Dillard's The Living (1992). Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Unbridled Books; First Edition edition (September 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932961003
• ISBN-13: 978-1932961003
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,564,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisitely written first novel, September 18, 2004

By 

Laurel Johnson (Kansas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Green Age of Asher Witherow (Hardcover)

The early buzz on this debut novel serves up terms like: "poetic intensity"; "strikingly beautiful prose style"; "unerring instinct for storytelling"; "a startling accomplishment"; and "lushly talented". I will state emphatically that Mr. Cunningham's first novel is all that and much more. This is a literary novel in the finest sense of the word, magnetic and seductive from first word to last.

Asher Witherow's story is told in first person. Young Asher is the only child of Welsh immigrants. His mother, Abicca, is strong, matriarchal. Father David works in the Black Diamond Mines circa the 1860s. Life is harsh and sometimes cruel for folks living in the dreary confines of the Contra Costa County California mining country. Miners work long hours below ground and their children join them at a very young age. Young Asher is no exception. He's a bright boy, curious and irrepressible. Death is witnessed at every turn, and stoically accepted as a necessary part of life in hard times. Asher's outlook is influenced by a young ministerial apprentice, Josiah Lyte, who wishes for the boy a better life. Friends Thomas Motion and Anna Flood bring life-changing influences to Asher's world. Present throughout is a strong sense of time and place, beautifully expressed.

The elderly Asher recounts his life in retrospect. His own words state best what life has been. "...I know the great black hole won't receive me till I've tied my guts into sailor's knots over regrets and dreams and other torments I'm helpless to alter."

It's impossible to adequately review such excellence. I've given you the bare essence of The Green Age of Asher Witherow. Readers who appreciate fine literary fiction or the classics simply must read this book. Those who enjoy American history and well written tales will find it exemplary. This is a book to be savored, written by a gifted wordsmith. It has my highest recommendation.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Multi-layered treatise on life, death, the human condition, May 12, 2005

By 

beth black (usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Green Age of Asher Witherow (Hardcover)

This book is definitely not for everyone, but the thoughtful reader will find much to savor. In chapters cycling from earth, blood, bone, ash, and back to earth Asher Witherow, winnowed out as special by the unconventional clergyman Josiah Lyte, experiences these elements in his first twenty years. There is a constant dichotomy and juxtaposition in this book. The spiritual and the earthly, the inner and the outer. Life inside the mines and outside the mines. Life and events inside and outside the self. The exposing of the earth's soul and the exposing of the human soul. The darkness of the mine and the darkness of night.

Although a history of mining life in California in the 1860s-1870s is presented, this is not typical historical fiction. This book is way more unique and philosophical.

My only caveat is that in the first half of the book I kept forgetting that the child narrator was just a child. Usually this irritates me, but because he is presented as highly intelligent the author manages to pull it off. All in all this is a stunning first novel published by a small press.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, November 20, 2006

By 

Nila J. Webster (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Green Age of Asher Witherow (Hardcover)

Here is a novel with the power and brilliance to enter into the heart of the reader. All the elements of great literary fiction are found in the pages of "The Green Age of Asher Witherow." The voice of the narrator looking back many decades to his boyhood could alone have carried this novel. But in addition to voice, the novel also offers a plot involving unforgettable characters who influence and change the boy forever.

One such character is Josiah Lyte, a young would-be Christian minister with a deep and haunting understanding of how life and death can hold hands and dance around each person. His presence holds an ambiguity in the eyes of the people of the town, whose version of Christianity is more literal and monotheistic than Lyte's: Lyte becomes the object of suspicion, even as he draws the narrator, Asher Witherow, closer to him and to a vision of life that is radical and renegade. The interaction between the two is arresting; Asher reflects: "I didn't tell Mother or Father that Lyte and I had spoken again. The confidence flared inside me wit the irresistible thrill of sin. It was so alarmingly simple not to speak, to clutch the secret deeply and own it all myself. The clutching grew delicous." In this relationship the reader can see and feel how we are pulled toward another person for inner reasons we don't fully understand; we can also see, even from the early pages of the novel, that this relationship of Asher's green age has stayed with him and become a part of his soul.

So to his relationships with his boyhood friend Thomas and his first young love, Anna, stay with him: these relationships are beautifully, poignantly drawn, as is his intense and watchful relationship with his parents. And if all this were not enough, the reader is also given a gripping plot involving harrowing experiences and pressing moral dilemmas.

Throughout this novel is the sustained writing: the magnificent voice of Asher reflecting back on his childhood. His descriptions of the earth and its evolution, and the meaning of this evolution, are woven throughout the pages, such that earth becomes yet another character whose force he recognizes. That the novel is set in a mining town and that the characters, including his father and he himself, must descend deep into the earth, intensifies this already intense novel.

"The Green Age of Asher Witherow" is a novel that truly shines out among literary fiction.