On the Night Plain: A Novel [Hardcover]

J. Robert Lennon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Explores the complications of love & work; loyalty to family, the land, & one's own desires; & the nature of solitude. This story about a man who reluctantly accepts his birthright in a hard-luck sheep-ranching family redefines the notion of a life worth living. Hoping to make a new life for himself after WW2, Grant Person abandons his family's ranch on the Great Plains for a fishing boat. But the death of his mother draws him back to the ranch left with a couple of hired hands, a sickly flock of sheep, & a pile of debt. Sofia, estranged from her father, struggles to find solace on the ranch, & instead finds herself drawn to Grant. The ensuing context of wills threatens to tear what is left of the Person family apart, & to revive ghosts that Grant had hoped were gone.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The brutally hard life of sheep ranchers on the Great Plains just after WWII provides the heartbeat of Lennon's brooding third novel. As in his 1997 debut, The Light of Shooting Stars, Lennon laconically records the punishing hardships of the Western landscape, counterbalanced by the open skies that, one characters says, have "ruined us for any other kind of life." From the start, doom and ruin hang over the Person family. Three of the six sons of John and Asta Person are fated to die young. A fourth, Thornton, is killed in WWII, and Grant, the brother whose place Thornton took in the draft, bolts from the ranch and labors on a fishing trawler for three years. Meanwhile, his brother Max assumes his responsibilities and his mother dies; when Grant finally returns, he discovers that his father has taken off for parts unknown. A bitter and resentful Max then leaves, too, for New York, to paint. Grant copes with a mountain of debts, a sickly flock and elderly ranch hands. Lonely, taciturn and racked by guilt, Grant exists in a dour, gray world defined by monotonous labor and hard-bitten men. When Max returns with a young woman, Sophia, love suddenly erupts in Grant, presaging sibling rivalry and a dramatic denouement. While Grant's intensely inward personality and his existence on life's "chill periphery," may initially alienate the reader, Lennon artfully heightens the emotional temperature with Grant's recurrent, prefiguring dream of a dead man he saw in Atlantic City. Fiercely realistic descriptions suffuse Lennon's prose: "gulls dangled overhead, tufted and greasy like dead wool"; "the cod's caustic eye twitching against the caustic air." The result is a terse and haunting story that speaks of the inescapable bonds of blood, the ineluctable hold of the land and the healing powers of work and solitude.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

It's clear from the first page of his quietly stunning third novel that Lennon doesn't intend to write the same book twice. This is a major departure from both the well-received The Light of Falling Stars, about the after-effects of a plane crash, and The Funnies, a wry look at a dysfunctional family. After World War II ends, Grant Person leaves his family's ranch on the Great Plains and heads for the East Coast. Behind him is the wreckage of a once-thriving family. Out of six brothers, only Grant and Max, his much younger brother, are left. Their mother's death three years later propels Grant home, and he finds the ranch fallen on hard times: his father is gone, and Max is on his way out the door to pursue his art. When Max returns the following year, he brings his girlfriend, whose presence sets up a disastrous conflict between the two men. Brotherly love gone bad, solitude turning to a rancid loneliness, the workings of fate, and a guilty conscience: this is the stuff of Greek tragedy, and Lennon does a masterly job of showing us a man who realizes that he is destined to "live a few scant miles from the heart of life, on its chill periphery." Highly recommended. Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.; First Edition edition (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 075679479X
• ISBN-13: 978-0756794798
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,029,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just plain good, July 5, 2004

By 

Jan Roelofs "bibliophile" (Miami) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On the Night Plain: A Novel (Paperback)

J. R. Lennon has mastered the art of capturing the simplest gesture or word , putting it on paper and evoking complex emotions and situations. In this, his third novel, the author takes us to the 1940s in Montana, a sheep ranch where two brothers, Grant and Max, with a complicated history, cut fleece, paint, build resentment and love the same woman. The use of "the dead man" in Grant's dreams is eerily effective. There is no clear cut hero or villian, though you do get inside the head of Grant, who allows himself to be seen as the bad guy rather than let his parents, now long gone, take the heat for tragedies in the family. Looking forward to Lennon's newest.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucid and Heartbreaking, August 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: On the Night Plain: A Novel

Lennon proves with this new book that he has amazing range. This is a very different book than either of his two previous, but it has at its center what makes all of his work so good: the stories of people who want to be happy while also being good. The combination often fails, and it is this failure that Lennon records with heartbreaking lucidity. Add in his photographer's eye for light and framing, and you'll understand why this is a five-star novel.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excllent read, July 31, 2001

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On the Night Plain: A Novel

Since the war with Japan ended, Grant Person has given a great deal of thought about leaving his family's remote ranch on the northern Great Plains. Grant who sees the haunting eyes of his parents and his younger brother Max daily cannot ignore the guilt of another sibling dying while serving his country in Grant's place. Unable to cope with the ghost, Grant takes the train east.

After several years away, Grant returns home to find his mother dead, his father gone, and Max abandoning the dilapidated ranch to paint. Grant decides to try to make a go of the ranch using the money he earned over the last few years as a sailor. A year later, Max returns with his girlfriend Sophia. Not long afterward, Grant and Sophia begin to fall in love splitting the siblings even more than when the older brother walked out several years ago.

ON THE NIGHT PLAIN is a perspicacious look at life on the Great Plains just after World War II. The story line paints a bleak picture of loneliness through the key characters, the two forlorn Pearson brothers. Readers will feel the bitter cold and solitude while trekking along the ranch. Once again J Robert Lennon has taken a dramatic twist from his previous novels (see THE LIGHT OF FALLING STARS and THE FUNNIES) by offering something new and different, yet retains the engaging prose expected of him.

Harriet Klausner