4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I am a person I never wanted to be.", September 14, 2005
This review is from: Out of Season (Hardcover)
Bausch takes an almost deserted landscape in Virginia Beach, a resort town abandoned by the tourists until the summer season, and peoples it with damaged characters that are at home with the isolation of this place. His protagonists act out their individual human dramas, each stumbling under a burden of unsettling and unfamiliar emotions. County Sheriff David Caldwell is opening up a local office, commuting back and forth to his home when not ensconced in the local, almost empty, Clary Hotel. Caldwell has never really recovered from the accidental death of his youngest son, Bobby, eight, at the hands of his eleven-year old brother, Todd. After going to trial before a judge, Todd was found guilty of manslaughter, sent to Juvenile Detention until his eighteenth birthday.
Two years later and living on his own resources, Todd chooses not to return home, but offers to meet with his father in Virginia Beach. David has failed to make peace with his older son; he has found it increasingly impossible to bridge the gap between Todd and himself. It is the nature of their tragedy, one in which neither can comfort the other. Caldwell is a tormented man, his loss of one son the occasion of the loss of the other, unsettling him in a way that allows no peace of mind. Meanwhile, Todd is nursing the hurts of a wasted childhood, in many ways still the wounded child who has done the unforgivable and torn his family asunder.
Lindsay Hunter is an adopted child in search of her birth mother. When she shows up at her mother's trailer, a scant distance from the Ferris Wheel on the boardwalk, Lindsey learns that her mother has been dead for a few years. Instead, her tentative knock is answered by a skeptical half-brother, Cecil Edwards, a massive and humorless man known for his eccentric behavior and dislike of the residents of Virginia Beach. Lindsey serves as an unexpected catalyst with her simple needs and unassuming acceptance of a half-brother whose personality is all but impenetrable. In this stark place, where men posture rather than relate, it is Lindsey who brings a quiet empathy to the male bravado that surrounds her, this macho territory where only dissatisfaction and anger find purchase.
With elegant precision, Bausch places his characters in counterpoint, each of their actions affecting the others in unexpected ways. Lindsey forms a relationship of sorts with Cecil, but is generally unable to overcome years of his antisocial veneer. Yet in her cautious exploration of new friendships with Todd and Sheriff Caldwell, Lindsey helps Todd redefine his relationship with his father. The enigmatic Cecil, while antagonizing the bored, middle-aged residents of Virginia Beach, has managed to remain aloof, his very size and temperament serving as a deterrent. But when these men, who can only act as a group, demand the Sheriff to address their problems, all are drawn into an unfolding drama of Shakespearean proportions. Bausch's characters embrace their fates, their complicated relationships ripe with despair, loneliness and abandonment. They wander, helpless, through a morass of uncomfortable feelings, groping toward a resolution that often seems impossible. In spite of considerable resistance, Bausch's characters, albeit often unwilling, learn the language of forgiveness. Luan Gaines/2005.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Maybe that's all we need. A will to love", November 27, 2005
This review is from: Out of Season (Hardcover)
There's not much going on in the Virginia resort town of Columbia Beach during wintertime. While the locals busy themselves with routine maintenance, most of their days are taken up by melancholic coffee mornings, catching up on all the local gossip, the feeling that they are now all officially retired; even the deputy sheriff's station and the small jail is abandoned.
Framed by the huge Ferris wheel that rises up out of the dune grass and scrub pines like a "great spiders web," the town has recently seen a decline in its fortunes, and whilst there are plenty of tourists in the summer, in winter, Columbia Beach, resembles a windswept outpost, a place where "the seasons had buckled the wood and the weather crinkled and rumpled paint as if it had been linen."
Todd Caldwell has just been released from juvenile prison. Blamed for the death of his younger brother Bobby, Todd is now an adult and a free man, outside and back in the world. For two years, Todd has been unable to face his family, but he has recently arrived in Columbia Beach, hoping to reunite with David, his father. The years haven't been kind to either Todd or to David, their reunion hampered by David's unalterable grief at the loss of Bobby, and Todd's overwhelming despondency, culpability, and guilt.
David is the newly appointed country sheriff to the town, but his desire to reconnect with is son, to rediscover the love that they once had has been distracting him from doing his job. Trouble has been brewing between the law-abiding residents of the town - most notably Vince McDole, owner of the gas station up on the main highway Route 95, and Cecil Edwards, who runs the Ferris wheel at the local amusement park. Vince believes that Cecil owes him money for working on his car, even though he failed to diagnose the problem.
Cecil isn't the type of man to use negotiation and dialogue to settle arguments. One afternoon he holds a gun to Vince's head, willfully taking the law into his own hands, demanding that Vince is wrong to ask for money. Cecil is a threatening giant of a man, an ex-marine, who over the years has alienated most of the town's residents, bullying everyone around and who now lives an isolated, lonely existence in a trailer home by his beloved Ferris wheel.
Meanwhile, Cecil's half sister Lindsay has just arrived in town, hoping to find her biological parents, and somehow reconnect with her half brother. Lindsay, who is a self confessed lover of books, approaches life unswervingly leaning forward in the current as one leans into a strong wind.
In meeting Cecil, Lindsay had hoped to find some kind of family peace, but her tearful reunion isn't quite what she pictured, and Lindsey finds herself examining her ideas about family relationships in a whole new light. Lindsay tries to push back at the hard exterior, the silent and spiteful brooding of her brother. Yet it is only through her bourgeoning friendship with Todd, that she can really understand the true meaning of connection.
The characters in Out of Season are all disaffected, urgently trying to find their way, and to perhaps rediscover love in a world that seems unnecessarily harsh and brutal. Author, Robert Bausch has woven a complex and nuanced portrait of damaged characters, each needing to retrieve, to recreate some little token of the past, and to temporality escape the dull present and the bleak future.
Caldwell, who holds onto the past too much - hears Bobby's distant and lost voice in the center of his consciousness, his grief now a feature of his life, "like light or air, or weather, a thing he woke to and lived with and went to sleep each night remembering." A part of Todd's soul seems to sink when he thinks of his brother, a possible future lost forever.
Throughout the book there are twists and turns, heartbreaks and unexpected revelations. The story is full of adolescent adults who blame their failures on everything else in the world except themselves, the failure, something they seem to covert and court every day of their lives, they're mostly men who never have enough money, never enough luck, "never enough of anything but smallness of spirit and envy."
These people are all faced with difficult choices, especially Todd, a man undone by atrocity, and David, who realizes that healing is possible, if not forgiveness. Tested to the depths of their soul, they both wrestle with the resolution of past and present. But there is always the lesson of hope; and maybe when the time comes around to it and the crunch comes, they can eventually find some of their loving, their friendship, and their need for each other. Mike Leonard November 05.
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