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The Green Age of Asher Witherow

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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.

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.

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.

This is without a doubt the most atmospheric book I've ever read. It was a great story, but even if it wasn't I don't think it would matter. The chapter where Asher's friend 'expires' (I don't want to give too much away) was like reading a nightmare. This is the best first book I've ever read. I'm definitely looking forward to his next.

A beautifully written book. It seems impossible that this lush and melancholy novel was written by a 26 year old. A must read for both those who love contemporary fiction and those who complain that it is too vapid and fad-oriented.

I think this book was well written. I could identify with the main character... with his life being in this town.. only to return later to find NOTHING. Most of my family grew up on the Coal industry... that being what first drew me to this book. I loved the story. The dynamics between all the characters was great as well as the suspicision of certain ones.. especially during THIS AGE. Most of us are haunted in some way by our childhood.. this one just gets to be haunted DAILY..even during childhood. It can come across as a slow read but it is worth the effort.

In the 1870s, preadolescent Asher Witherow, being of Welsh descent, works alongside his father in the mines of Nortonville, California. Death, the norm of working underground, is a blink away as Asher sees first hand when he watches his best friend Thomas burns to death in an accident in an abandoned mine. Feeling guilty over the death of his pal, when Asher is questioned he denies knowing anything, which in turn adds to his remorse.

Though lacking the slightest evidence, the townsfolk blame seminarian Josiah Lyte for the fiery death of Thomas probably because he is different with his Hindu and Buddha beliefs that enlighten his faith in Christ. The prejudiced locals do not trust anyone remotely dissimilar, but do nothing except somewhat ostracize the preacher.

A few years later, Asher's twelve year old pregnant girlfriend and his mother die in separate incidents. Everyone blames Josiah except Asher, who knows the truth like he knows what happened four years ago.

Though at times author M. Allen Cunningham uses lyrical language that seem out of place for graphic scenes, historical readers will appreciate this first person account by Asher looking back at the pivotal early events that shaped and hindered his life. Asher is an interesting person struggling years later as an adult with the guilt he feels over the deaths of three people he cared about whom all died when he was a pre-teen. THE GREEN AGE OF ASHER WITHEROW furbishes a compelling look at first and second generation late nineteenth century Welsh-Americans working the mines that as the protagonist's stoic dad accepts as all there is in life.

Harriet Klausner

I would like to let everyone reading know that I have no intention of putting down this book or the author in a negative way. My intention is to simply communicate to people about how I, one individual of many who have bought and read this book, feel about it--in hopes that it will help them decide whether or not they want to purchase it.

This book is without a doubt very intriguing. From the start it presents to you a view of a world that very little people reading it would have known. Early on it establishes strong roots and a solid foundation. It's also quite a page-turner. The writing is fluid, and the story is strong.

Despite being overall a good book, the basic structure of the story did seem awfully tried and tested. It didn't feel like anything especially unique or new. Which is not necessarily a bad thing--the author used a structure that has been tried and tested throughout the years to make many classic novels, and though sometimes it can seem a bit too familiar, it does very well work with the story.

Climbing into the mind of the character, throughout different ages is definitely fun and interesting--but it seemed like the general atmosphere of the book was a bit dry, and lacking a good bed of water. I always felt like a needed a hardy meal after reading a book bit of it.

Overall, this was a very good and satisfying read. The author has lots of artistic opportunity, and room to grow. I'm looking foreward to reading more.

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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Beautiful prose and some interesting flirtations with nineteenth-century philosophy. For me, though, in the end there's not enough story here to make the book memorable.

All the events affecting the characters and the little mining town in which they live are disastrous, to the point of caricature, and none of them seem to be brought about by protagonist choices or actions; even the vividly described death of a boy in a mine and an accidental pregnancy seem like the results of some looming, inexplicably malevolent Fate. The narrative style in which the story is told by the main character late in life ensures that we know he survives. The beauty of the sentence-level style masks the problems with the plot to some extent but doesn't, in the end, conceal its general pointlessness.