Customer Reviews

The New Valley: Novellas

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author certainly gets to the core of his characters and is able to let us see the world through their eyes and experience their emotions. In fact, one emerges 'feeling their world' as it were, which is a world that is certainly quite different from my own.

However, while the stories are satisfying and emotional, particularly the one about Stillman, I found them rather slow moving. This is particularly true of the last one, during which my interest was lost long before the ending. Definitely less grabbing than the other two. Nonetheless, I found myself wanting more than just seeing and feeling through the characters eyes. In short, I felt like there simply wasn't enough happening to really keep me wanting to continue through the stories.

I know this one got wonderful reviews from The NYT Book Review etc, and while I thought it was good, I just didn't find it to be THAT good. A solid three stars, at least that was what it did for me.

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Josh Weil's first book, and it is extraordinary. He is the real deal; a great writer with something to say about the intricate sadness and bravery and hopefulness of the human heart. Set in the hardscrabble country of Southwest Virginia, each of these three novellas is a gem, each different, each moving and involving and stunning in the simplicity and beauty of the language. Josh Weil is The Next Great Thing in American fiction. Don't miss it.

This is the satisfying read of the spring. I have stacked next to me the Spivet book, and one about when Thoreau set fire to the woods around Concord, and another about a novelist in Iran in a struggle with his censor. Each is fine, and I'll get through them, plus the stack of other books that are there too, but this collection of novellas is what I was longing for...you just read it and can have a satisfied "yes" response. Have had similar reactions to the first novel I read by Rick Bass, and Jim Harrison, and McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and Doig's Dancing at Rascal Creek, and Ron Carlson. Take the first novella: images, such as late spring snow, and sunset, a deserted house, cars driving in the distance worked into great, paced story telling. The main character of the novella is revealed as a complex flesh and blood guy, not some mopey sad sack, not some romantic heroic larger than life man-of-solitude, and yet he's more than just his singular life--seems to point to verities of living. Of all the books for this spring, this is the one I'll want to put in other's hands.

The depth and grace of the storytelling, the lyric precision of the language, the richly-rendered setting, and the unforgettable characters make The New Valley a stunning, accomplished debut. Best of all, it's unlike any book I have read before. Weil is an undeniably powerful new voice in contemporary fiction.

Josh Weil's writing is visceral. The physical quality of his descriptions and the way he designs the stories are unusual and compelling. For example, at the end of the first story Osby resolves the problem that was presented in the story's first sentence. The author's drawings illustrate the second story's central metaphor. The language in the third story lets you watch a bit removed as the main character is treated as one who is removed from everyday society. These three stories describe the core being of three different bone lonely men told in a convincing way. They are worth reading several times.

I am an avid reader, especially of newly published fiction. This is right up there with the Pulizer-winning Olive Kitteridge (2008) by Elizabeth Strout. The book consists of three separate, but inter-linked, short novels set in the hardness that life offers those who live it out in America's backcountry. Then there are those who finally give up, pull the trigger. And that is where the reader will find herself when opening up a book that I suspect will not be easy to put down. The language is truly brilliant with skies that are tacked up by stars. There are books which I treat like a rich dessert, refusing to let myself finish up because I just know that the next book I pick up will be so much less. And this is just that kind of work. It will get awards--or it should anyway.

In our fast-paced, increasingly urbanized world, Josh Weil's novella collection "The New Valley" is a gem. Weil has a gift for naturalistic description. His resonant prose is avidly attentive to landscape, as though distilled from many hours of meditative observation. Yet, despite this, the narratives are expertly paced, their events unfolding organically from the setting and characters, often in quiet yet surprising ways. I highly recommend!

I adored this collection of novellas, but I fell particularly in love with "Sarverville Remains," an achingly beautiful story told from the point-of-view of, for want of a much better word, a "retarded" young man, who falls in love with Mrs. Podawalski, a local exotic dancer. Josh Weil handles this relationship with a delicacy and beauty that left me in awe. He is an incredibly talented writer, one to watch!

As a reader of Jim Harrison's novellas, I was very impressed with Weil's debut. Unlike a lot of collections you read, the three novellas here are actually very different from each other, mostly in terms of what actually happens in them, but also in the way they're told, the style of the writing (the third is a crazy narrative told from the point of view of a mentally handicapped man who has found himself in a dangerous love triangle), yet they are similar in all the right ways so that the book delivers a deeply felt portrait of bleak rural life, and packs a hell of an emotional punch. There are authors who seem to be able to really bring a place alive, to imagine something in such a real way that you just believe they know what they're talking about. Harrison does that, and one of my other favorites, Cormac McCarthy, does it, and Josh Weil does it too. The New Valley is a fully imagined book, with stunning descriptions and many breathtaking details, full of sad, haunted men, and it's obvious that Weil knows these people as well as he knows the land. Like Ethan Canin, Weil writes like a much older man. But he's obviously young enough to have just been named one of the "5 under 35" writers to watch by the National Book Awards people which, once you've read this, won't come as a surprise.

The characters in The New Valley are flesh and blood. Their lives are not flashy - I may not have even slowed down, if I drove by their house on a rural road. But this book shows that their struggles are primal, and compelling. The writing and pacing are pitch perfect. I have read the book once, and I know I will read it again and again.