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Hard Rain Falling

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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

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.

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.

This novel was published in 1966 and was a commercial flop.That is understandible.It's quite good and never fails to hold your interest.However it might have stood a better chance if it had come out 10 years later.Carpenters calm, matter of fact take on homosexuality was without a doubt a deal breaker for many readers, even in the mid '60s.A larger problem can be summed up with a question ,who was this books audience in 1966?It has many of the elements of a genre novel.There is crime ,violence,straight sex, gay sex,prisons,reformatories ,orphanages,lots of drinking and a little drugging.The characters are by and large urban low lives who drift through the Pacific North West and Northern California.In 1966 the distinction between high and low was still strong and a novel with this much of a whiff of genre to it wasn't going to appeal to high brow readers, let alone those looking for uplift.On the other hand I suspect genre readers would have tended to be irritated by the brooding intellectualism of the book.Carpenters' literary antecedents are Nelson Algren and Dreiser.Carpenter lacks Driesers' touch of genius but is vastly superior to the atrocious Algren.So the book undoubtedly wound up being a fish out of water.It's too bad someone didn't try to revive it while Carpenter was still alive to benefit.That said NYRB Classics once more deserves praise for reissuing a good book most of us have never heard of.

"Hard Rain Falling" is not a book with a page-turner plot but there is something in the quality of the writing that brings you in. This is a world of men, not people at all I understand. Tough guys in pool halls who end up in jail, having a lot of sex and coming to terms with the truth that no institution, man or god cares how it all turns out for them. And yet, because of the quality of the writing, I can empathize because though my life is far less dramatic, I too understand that no protective force cares how it all turns out for me either. So the only question left is, in an life where you are born into limited resources, where great forces tie down your choices regardless of your talent or will, how are you going to live it? For the characters in the book, the question is often answered for them but even in the small worlds they're doomed to reside in--literally at times the size of a jail cell--they somehow find the courage to get through another day or even choose death over life, not out of depression but in one instance, out of human connection.

The book is a "New York Review of Books Classic" with the physical quality of the paperback better than most. If you are like me and have a very limited number of novels you can read a year, this one is highly recommended.

Set largely in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and California penal institutions in the fifties and early sixties, the gritty and sporadically violent novel traces the coming of age of Jack Levitt, from his breakout from the hellish orphanage where he grew up to Northwest pool halls to San Quentin. While it gives an inside view of these dubious venues (including a convincing tale of prison love life), the book also goes deep inside Levitt, an introspective, violent and mercurial young man. And it does so sympathetically and at times humorously.

As in the scene where Levitt, uneducated, broke, and a recent jailbird without prospects, goes a lonely three-day drunk in a seedy hotel room, swilling whiskey from quart bottles, regurgitating and drinking more. He has recently broken the jaw of his only "friend," thrown out an under-aged girl smitten with him after having his pleasure with her, and faces arrest on capital kidnapping charges. Cold and sick, he drifts in and out of consciousness, examining his hopeless situation, seeing has nothing to live for, contemplating suicide. Yet his drunken introspection finally leads to an epiphany of sorts:

"Bull****," he said aloud. "Bull****. I'm just in a bad mood."

But while we see Levitt grow intellectual and morally we also glimpse his philosophical nature, his struggle to divine the power of love, loyalty, knowledge and freedom. He's smart enough to recognize the force of institutions as he moves through them--the orphanage, the billiard hall, the jail, the prison, the government and ultimately marriage. He finds that it's not just the people--you could kill all of them, he suggests, and nothing would change--but the rules, both written and unwritten, i.e., culture, that matter most, intangible yet potent. He also muses on individual crime, for which powerless people like Levitt get punished, and the crimes of society and the powerful, which get applauded or ignored.

But most compelling for me about the novel was the time-traveling back to the American fifties, the rough-edged, convincing dialogue and a view of the gritty underside of West Coast life a half century past--including the sordid life inside orphanages and prisons. Like most all literature, according to Arthur Miller, it tries to answer the question-in this case for Jack Levitt-"How do you make for yourself a home?" While Levitt doesn't come to a solid answer, he rules out a few things, and the reader is left with the feeling that he just may figure it out some day.

This works on so many different levels. First, Carpenter's writing is cool and detached yet also full of so much longing that it is impossible not to feel empathy for each of these characters. Second, the story arc -- beginning with one couple and their problems and ending with an entirely different one with their own problems -- is so well-plotted and so well-constructed that one has to stop at the end of the book to say, "Did Carpenter really just pull this totally original, and fully American, novel off?" The answer to that question is that he does pull it all off and the reader is better for having read it.

This story is very dark, but also contains a lot of insight into the prison system, reform schools and the individuals that are incarcerated. Would recommend for anyone with an interest in psychology or criminal justice.

This book was initially published in 1966, but was resurrected by George Pelecanos and published anew in 2009 by New York Review Books as part of its Classics series. In his introduction, Pelecanos suggests that it "might be the most unheralded important American novel of the 1960s."

I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but it is a very good book with brilliantly drawn characters. The main protagonist is Jack Levitt, an orphan whom we first meet on the streets of Portland, Oregon, in 1947. Jack is 17 at the time and has fallen in with a gang of rough boys who live by their wits on the margins of society.

The book follows Jack's life until 1960, and it's not a pretty picture. Jack is in and out of trouble and, as a consequence, is also in and out of jail through most of this time. Some of the prison scenes are harrowing but, for that matter, so are many of the scenes when Jack is out on the streets, technically a "free" man.

Early on, Jack meets Billy Lancing, a young black pool hustler from Seattle. Jack, who has no special skills or talents, envies Billy who has a great natural gift as a pool player. Initially, Jack targets Billy as a mark, but the two form a bond that will carry them as they cross paths through the years.

Jack and Billy both spend a great deal of time contemplating their own lives and the nature of life in general, and there are times when Carpenter extends these ruminations for a bit longer than he should. But that is really the only flaw in this book whose principal strength lies in its characters, even the most minor of whom are fully realized and unforgettable.

There is not a single phony or contrived moment in "Hard Rain Falling," and from start to finish, the reader is immersed into a universe that seems completely real and that is totally compelling. This is not a pretty world, but once Carpenter has grabbed hold of you, you can't turn away from watching it.

This is very much a book of the early 1960s, and the universe that Carpenter has recreated here is long since gone. He serves up a slice of American life that few of us would want to experience first hand. But readers will be grateful to George Pelecanos and New York Review Books for giving them the opportunity to visit it from a safe distance.