Hard Rain Falling [Mass Market Paperback]

Don Carpenter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 1987

Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a tough-as-nails account of being down and out, but never down for good—a Dostoyevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption. The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary confinement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class—married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But neither Jack nor Billy can escape their troubled pasts, and they will meet again in San Quentin before their strange double drama comes to a violent and revelatory end.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Tarmac-tough dialogue and road-novel deliquent action is customised with a tender intensity about both friendship and sexual passion.  Often savage, never cynical, Carpenter brings gold to the grit."—Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

“Hard Rain Falling is a unique read; violent, tender, inexorable, and melancholic; a beat-era book of disaffected young men devoid of On the Road euphoria but more poignant and gripping for its fatalistic grounding. The small lives contained herein are indelible.” —Richard Price

"You always hear that Don Carpenter was a writer's writer, hugely admired by critics and novelists for his brilliance and precision, but every civilian reader I know was putty in his hands once that person opened any of his astonishing novels. He could be hilarious, and he could break your heart and he could write about ego and frailty as well as anyone on earth. I loved him like crazy." --Anne Lamott

"Don Carpenter is a particular favorite of mine. His first novel, Hard Rain Falling, might be my candidate for the other best prison novel in American literature." --Jonahtan Lethem

"Carpenter's masterpiece, long out of print, is the definitive juvenile-delinquency novel and a damning indictment of our justice system that is still relevant today." -- George Pelecanos, The Village Voice

"Carpenter's prose is all muscle and sinew." --Newsweek

"Don Carpenter combines a reporter's eye for external detail with a novelist's sense of inner depts." --Los Angeles Times

"Hard Rain Falling roars through dim Western streets like an articulate Hells Angel looking for a fight... The book is tough and vital, built with slabs of hard prose." --The New York Times

"Hard Rain Falling is Last Exit to Brooklyn amended but unaltered by cries of affection under the heap of warped and busted souls." --The New York Times

"Full of lyrical evocations of a lost working-class San Francisco, the novel also contains possibly the best two-page drunken celebration of cheap, corny, vulgar, un-cleaned-up Market Street ever set in print." --The San Francisco Chronicle

"A powerful, uncompromising book, realistically written, brutal in the raw intensity of its action...highly recommended." --Library Journal

"Mr. Carpenter's debut is most auspicious. He is a serious writer." --Book Week

"Not since...Last Exit to Brooklyn has there come a first novel of such extraordinary impact. It shouts for readers." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

"He chills us with documentation...an imaginative work...boldly executed." --The New York Times Book Review

"Don Carpenter is a natural...a tough but compassionate soul...an absolutely honest writer who never strikes a false note." --Robert Brustein

"Full of passionate intensity...rough and tumble picaresque." --Charlotte Observer

"A violent, action-filled...first novel by an explosive 34 year old San Francisco writer...This tough guy novel that explores an underworld is a work of real accomplishment." --The San Francisco Chronicle --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Don Carpenter (1931–1995) was born in Berkeley, California, and grew up on the West Coast. He served in the air force during the Korean War, attended the University of Portland, and received a B.S. from Portland State College and an M.A. from San Francisco State College. Carpenter, his wife, Martha, and their two daughters settled in Mill Valley, near San Francisco, and he became good friends with the local writers Evan Connell and, especially, Richard Brautigan. His first book, Hard Rain Falling, was published in 1966 and was followed by nine other novels as well as several collections of short stories. Carpenter also wrote for the movies and television and spent a good deal of time in Hollywood, the subject of several of his novels. Plagued by poor health in his later years, he committed suicide at the age of sixty-four.

George Pelecanos is the author of sixteen novels and was a writer, story editor, and producer on the HBO series The Wire. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (March 12, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345339037
• ISBN-13: 978-0345339034
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,650,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Where the executioner's face is always well hidden, September 28, 2009

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number, . . ."

Bob Dylan, A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall.

Jack Levitt has had a hard rain fall on him his entire life. The unwanted, abandoned product of a furtive coupling between two feral teens in the Pacific Northwest; the result of what Jack describes as a compulsive itch between two strangers, his life is not the stuff that dreams are made of. But Jack Levitt's life is the stuff of a great and absorbing story in Don Carpenter's brutal and powerful "Hard Rain Falling". "Hard Rain Falling" is one of those books which, after I read it, made me wonder why I'd never heard of the book or the author before.

In his Introduction, George Pelecanos writes that this book may be "the most unheralded important American novel of the 1960s." I read that with a grain of salt, thinking that this may just be a bit of overblown flattery not uncommon in Introductions written by other authors. But as far as I'm concerned this book is every bit as good as Pelecanos made it out to be. He was not exaggerating.

Written in 1964, Hard Rain Falling opens with the `itch' in 1929 that brought Jack Levitt into this world but quickly moves to the result. It is 1947 and Levitt is a hard-nosed teen on the run from the orphan asylum he was raised in. He gets by on his wits and with his fists, hangs out in bars and pool halls looking for a mark, and lives in flop houses. He in angry and unformed, he is grown up but devoid of an inner life. The story takes Jack and his some time `friends' through Portland, Seattle and finally to San Francisco in the early 1960s. There are also stops in county jails and a stretch in San Quentin.

The story of Jack's journey is compelling for any number of reasons. First, the story itself is told in a way that drew me in almost from the start. Carpenter's writing is terse and the words come at you like the sort of jab Jack learned during his stint as a boxer. Even when Carpenter reaches insides Jack's thoughts he avoid excess sentimentality and maudlin over-wrought sentences. Second, the book focuses on two critical, interrelated relationships Jack has. The first is with a fellow teen runaway, Billy. They first meet in a pool hall and they have an on again and off again friendship that doesn't blossom until they end up as cell mates in San Quentin. That is the external relationship that drives half of the book and an act of profound selflessness on Billy's part is the act that sets of a chain of self examination that may eventually transform Jack's life. The second is Jack's internal relationship with the anger that lives inside him. As the book progresses you see that anger grow until it seems ready to consume Jack in a fire of his own making. Those two relationships form the basis for Carpenter's examination as to whether Jack can escape the fate he seemed destined for from the moment he was born. As I read I saw the struggle Jack had with questions of life, death and the value (or not) of his own existence. To the extent that there is some hope for redemption or rebirth in this story, Jack's painful struggle to deal with his relationship with Billy and with his own anger makes the outcome seem realistic and satisfying. This is not a fairy tale. This is an examination of life in the belly of the beast as seen through the eyes of someone who has lived that life.

Dylan's song ends with this:

And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

It is a perfect epitaph (Carpenter published this book in 1964 and Dylan's song came out in 1963) for Levitt and the life he has led. "Hard Rain Falling" was as good a book as I've read in a long time. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A melancholy masterpiece, September 25, 2009

By 

R. Sohi - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

For many people reading "Hard Rain Falling" will offer the thrill of discovering a brilliant unheard of author. It was for me. The novel grabs you with the force of its authenticity and maintains its hold through the power of both Don Carpenter's beautiful writing as well as the depth of his insight. The characters grow and evolve, sometimes in surprising directions, but they always come across as being fully realized and emotionally complex. They are constantly brutalized by the world they live in, and the passages describing some of their experiences are harrowing. It is at times oppressive in its intensity but there isn't a false note.

The novel's introduction is written by George Pelecanos, who was one of the writers for HBO's amazing series, "The Wire." This is fitting. Both the novel and the series share a focus on the violent struggle and tortured inner lives of characters living in an unforgiving world. Both also ask questions about who we really are and what meaning we are to make of all we endure.

"Hard Rain Falling" is the best novel I've read in a long time. It's excellence makes me want to read it again and seek out the author's other work.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hell is other people, September 29, 2009

By 

Keith A. Comess - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Sometimes books enter the out-of-print category because they aren't any good and no one wants to read them. Sometimes the book is good (or even superb) and nobody will bother to read it anyway. This book falls into the second category.

The plot of "Hard Rain Falling" is linear: in other words, "that" follows logically and immediately from "this". The book is written in the French style of "roman dur" (a "hard novel", a la Georges Simenon). It is terse, set in grim and gray surroundings and is stark in its descriptions. There are, for the most part, few words wasted.

Jack Levitt, the protagonist, is a "hard case" orphan born of hard case parents. As anticipated, Jack's life follows an Oedipal-like trajectory (i.e, a fate which he apparently cannot escape, not that he is especially motivated to do so). Only the most obtuse reader could fail to anticipate the bad end which Carpenter has pre-ordained from the patently bad beginning. Jack drinks too much, resents too much, fights too much, bucks society too much, is too individualistic and, later on, spends too much time engaged in introspection: a toxic combination of character traits, indeed. Aside from all that, he falls into a homosexual relationship with Billy Lancing (the other major character) while in prison. He later marries a red-hot "nympho" rich woman with whom (yes, you guessed it) he has a child who he seems to love (but later on evidently forgets). Sally, the woman in question, then leaves him, taking the child along for a "better life" with a rich, philosophically-inclined patron. She dumps him as well and takes up again with her first husband, a bit-part but quite successful actor. The child's fate can be surmised, namely a likely reprise of Jack's. This depressing scenario closes the circle of fate on Jack. While Carpenter doesn't spell it out in the end, its pretty clear Jack is doomed to a hard, mean and short life.

Billy Lancing is a Mischlinge (in Nazi terminology), that is, he is a mixed-race black man. Billy has a natural talent in billiards which he parlays into a career as a small-time pool shark. He crosses Jack's path early in his career. Paths cross again later on in San Quentin prison. Billy is cast in the role of a character foil: a genuine talent (Jack has none), but also doomed by circumstances of race, environment and character flaws. Though obviously endowed with considerable intelligence along with his billiards acumen, he chucks his better options in the garbage to continue the intermittently thrilling and ultimately unrewarding path he selected at a very young age. In short, like Jack, he understands much but has learned nothing. Billy also serves as the vehicle which allows the author entree into the demi-monde of mid-twentieth century pool halls, which is the general backdrop for the novel. Like Ian Fleming, too much ink is spilled in extravagant descriptions of various games of chance.

While some of the interior monologues and dialogue now appear offensive and dated, they are consonant with the received wisdom of the time and in the circumstances of the novel. For the modern reader, the only difficult paradoxes are Jack's unequivocal acceptance of Billy as a friend, cellmate and later as a lover and Billy's altruistic self-destruction, undertaken to save Jack from a prison "wolf". Jack even names his child after Billy. The extent and depth of racism of that era and in Jack's social strata seem a bit too ingrained for the degree of bonding that occurs in the story. Since everyone in this book loses as a result of self-destructive tendencies and as victims of circumstance, redemption is not within grasp and hell is other people.

Maybe it was Carpenter's apparent acceptance of homosexuality that deep-sixed this book. Rather, I suspect the reading public was not looking much for dour, unredemptive literature in the heyday of Robert Ruark and Jacqueline Suzanne, at least not from American authors. This style was popular in France (where Jim Thompson, Boris Vian, Celine and Henry Miller could sell books). The American "hip cats" were generally too involved with more uplifting Bohemians like Jack Keruoac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to bother with this stuff. Even Bukowski was more palatable because the reader knows his work is autobiograhical and he's a best-selling author. Not so with Carpenter, who killed himself at age 64. So, into the out-of-print neverland with this book.