Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel [Hardcover]

Fenton Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1993

Raphael Hardin, a young gay man, returns home to visit his dying father--who disapproves of his son's lifestyle but is unaware that his son may be dying as well--in an attempt to reconcile before it is too late.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Johnson follows Crossing the River with a wise and compassionate novel. Eleven episodes explore the history of the Hardin family of Strang Knob, Ky., a fading community hidden away in the Appalachians. At the thematic center is 36-year-old Raphael, youngest of the seven Hardin children, who, in the first episode, "High Bridge," has come home from San Francisco to visit his dying father Tom and is himself dying of AIDS. This beautifully realized story paints an elegiac but unflinching portrait of a gay son's alienation from his harsh parent, even in the face of death. Other sections weave through time to flesh out complex family and community relationships, at the same time establishing the obsolescence of the Hardins' traditional ways. The philosophical voices of Raphael and Miss Camilla Perkins, a spinster schoolteacher who has spent decades on the periphery of the Hardin clan, shape this collage of family life and loss into an affecting whole, even though other narrators are not as striking. In the lesser pantheon of Hardin storytellers are Joe Ray, Raphael's alcoholic brother who learns to live with guilt after causing the car accident that injures his son; Elizabeth, the sister who fulfills her mother's dreams of moving to California, only to experience loneliness and failure; and Clark, the son meant to continue Tom's legacy in the community, but who dies in Vietnam. Johnson movingly conveys the senselessness of death, the inevitability of loss and the failure of families to shield us from either.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A tender, haunting account of a rural southern family's demise as the parents sicken and die, the gay son contracts AIDS, and other siblings leave for greener urban pastures. Written in stories, each one dated, Johnson's second novel (Crossing the River, 1989) manages to be both intimate and panoramic. Raphael, 36, is the gay son of Tom and Rose Ella Hardin, but the point of view here moves easily from family member to family member--including sister Elizabeth, who near the end collects Raphael's ashes in 1990, and next-door neighbor Miss Camille Perkins, a fount of common wisdom. The story, set in the west Appalachian town of Strang Knob, begins with Tom working wood and musing on his wife's death and his own cancer, which is killing him: he ``has lost the will to ward off the voices and visions.'' Meanwhile, Raphael, the youngest of seven, muses at various places throughout about his long coming-out process, which turned him into ``a human being instead of a rock.'' Son Clark dies in 1970 in Vietnam in the chapter story ``All Fall Down.'' In ``Little Deaths,'' set in 1942, Tom in Rose Ella's presence saves a dog from drowning in a flooded river, thereby sealing the unbreakable bond between them. The book is especially strong in its exploration of the varieties of grief that accompany deaths and losses, though on occasion--as when Raphael in 1972 faces intimations of his sexual orientation in the person of self-described mechanic Willie-- Johnson also displays an antic streak. Thoughtful and poised: a careful family chronicle with a gay twist is brought to a poignant close with a haunting plea--``Who will remember me?'' -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Books; 1st edition (July 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671795414
• ISBN-13: 978-0671795412
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,253,844 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving story, great characters, interesting structure., June 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel (Paperback)

Author Fenton Johnson tells a moving story peopled with colorful, believable characters. Raphael, the gay son of Tom Hardin, returns home to his dying father. Each chapter is a complete and satisfying story. The stories are told from perspectives of various family members at different points in their lives. The chronology is not linear, engaging the reader's attention in interesting ways. Johnson convincingly presents the emotions of human relations, against the detailed backdrop of one southern family. He transports the reader into the world of a son striving to come to terms with his father before it is too late.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful novel, October 19, 2006

By 

J Martin Jellinek (Memphis, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel (Paperback)

Scissors, Paper, Rock is an unusual novel. On one level it is about dying - from AIDS, cancer, heart failure, war. Death comes in so many different ways, yet it results in loss, both of the deceased and of the memories that lived with that person. Death changes people in unique and complicated ways. Johnson explores this theme with tenderness and grace.

He also explores the role of myth in history. Are those things that we know as true really fact, or are they those things that we believe are true because they define who we are. Are our parents really who we believe them to be or is our understanding of them based on the stories that they choose to tell? Does this lessen the power of the stories or lessen the veracity of the story tellers? Johnson very adeptly addresses this theme.

Among these deep levels, there is a story of a family in rural Kentucky and their lives together and separately. The characters are well portrayed and the background is very true to life.

This is not an easy book, but it is well worth your time.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amid an epidemic of silences, a gesture of faith in the continuity of things, January 11, 2011

By 

Bill Coan (Hortonville, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel (Hardcover)

Fenton Johnson isn't just a student of silences; he is an architect of them. In Scissors, Paper, Rock, he has fashioned out of countless silences a story about the transience of life, the nature of family, and the power of storytellers.

The silences that Johnson works with belong mostly to the Hardin family of Strang Knob, Kentucky:

When patriarch Tom Hardin abandons his pregnant wife Rose Ella and their six children (each under eight years of age) for two weeks of hunting with friends, Rose Ella cannot bring herself to voice her anger. Instead she seethes in silence for months.

When Tom and Rose Ella's son Clark is initiated into sex, he instinctively knows that his new knowledge is "too huge and dangerous to be put into words." After Clark is killed in Vietnam, Tom, "out of contempt for his own wordlessness," pins Rose Ella against a wall and strikes her. Thereafter, Tom and Rose Ella behave "as if Clark had died in a car wreck or of some strange, unheard of, untalked about disease."

When Tom and Rose Ella's son Joe Ray causes a car accident that injures their grandson Michael, leaving Michael physically disabled for life, Tom stays away from the hospital, "wordless in the face of matters of such enormity." The driver of another car involved in the accident tells Joe Ray, "Your son--that's too big to talk about." Thereafter, the members of the Hardin family "silently agree to ignore Michael's disability because it is too large and threatening to comprehend."

When Tom and Rose Ella's son Raphael awakens to homosexuality, he loses his voice. After Raphael settles in San Francisco and begins bringing men home with him on visits to Strang Knob, Tom hides out in his workshop, and Rose Ella is careful not to ask questions. Raphael and his friends "seemed to like it that way."

When Raphael returns home alone one year, grieving the loss of his lover, Rose Ella can't bring herself to ask what she would have to ask in order to learn more about Raphael's situation. She is afraid of what he might say and of "finding out what she already knows." The silence between them "grows into something she can touch, the size and shape of themselves."

The other members of the Hardin family also fail to discuss Raphael's situation with him or even among themselves. "None of them have wanted to hear what the others were unwilling to say," Rose Ella realizes, wondering, "How could grief, joy, love, or desire be spoken of, when they weren't comprehended by words themselves?"

When Raphael's sister-in-law Catherine privately expresses sympathy for Raphael's loss, and Raphael asks her how she has figured out that he has lost not just a friend but a lover, she replies, "You open your ears and listen to what people aren't talking about."

Rose Ella tells Raphael that she knew he was different even before he emerged from the womb and asks him if it would have helped him to be able to talk to someone about his difference as he grew up. "What words could I have used?" Raphael asks in reply. "I'd never heard them. You'd never heard them. And even if I'd had the words--who would I have talked to?"

At a family gathering Rose Ella asks Raphael to speak to Joe Ray, saying, "Talk to him about his drinking. Just be careful not to mention it." At the same family gathering an instance of racist behavior by a child, an instance of artistic expression by a male guest, and an instance of impassioned speaking by Raphael (about men dying alone in San Francisco) are all met with silence.

When Tom is diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live, he and Rose Ella talk very little about what is to become of her after his death. When Rose Ella unexpectedly dies before Tom, daughter Elizabeth feels confronted for the first time by "the unanswering deafness of death's door, and the finality of its closing."

When Raphael returns home a final time to spend time with his dying father, the two of them hardly speak to each other. Miss Camilla, a spinsterly school teacher and family friend who lives next door, tells Tom that what his son has to say is important, "otherwise he could bring himself to speak." Observing Tom and Raphael's shared difficulty in talking to each other, she thinks to herself, "Surely this would be the act of greatest courage: sitting down and speaking something hard and true face-to-face with someone you love."

Miss Camilla, contemplating her own love for Tom Hardin, is struck dumb. "What was there to say?" she wonders. "A few words, and I said none of them." Spending time with Raphael, she is equally silent. "Unspeaking," she writes afterward, "we acknowledged the ways in which we were bound to each other by ties that were strong as blood: student and teacher, neighbor and friend; ties of love."

When Raphael returns to San Francisco and falls deathly ill, his sister Elizabeth takes him for a drive, during which he tells her, "I'm happy being quiet here with you." Elizabeth can't bring herself to say that she wants the drive to never end, so they finish the drive in silence. After Raphael's death, Elizabeth realizes that "there is no more saying to be said."

Not since The Great Gatsby has a next-door neighbor played such an important role in telling a story. Miss Camilla's sophistication as a teacher of literature, when combined with her special vantage as neighbor, allows her to see, understand, and reveal to the reader things that escape the notice of most of the other characters in the novel.

It is Miss Camilla who helps the reader understand that silences are part of the great weather systems of family and community life, and that they can be especially tragic given the transience of life. At the end of the novel, when she reflects on the silences that she has witnessed and endured among the members of the Hardin family, she concludes that life consists of "moments of grace, each partly seized and mostly lost," and she feels torn between "remorse that these moments were so short and gratefulness that they happened at all."

Miss Camilla also helps to convey the fact that families can be bound as tightly by love as by blood. When she and Raphael speak of their ties to others, they acknowledge their childlessness: "We have nothing to pass on," one of them says. "Except our love," the other replies.

Miss Camilla's greatest contribution to the reader involves calling attention to the lasting impact of stories such as those that she and various members of the Hardin family tell. "No single person may give to another person any part of what she or he believes to be true without also giving love," she observes, adding, "In this way our stories become our way of lovemaking, our way of creating love." She also points out that "buildings, roads, fortunes, gravestones disappear even as stories accumulate."

Fenton Johnson uses shifting points of view and out-of-sequence narrative elements to amazing effect, yielding two very moving climaxes, one at mid-book and the other at the end. Other dramatic high points abound throughout the text. Insights into love, loss, grief, memory, and desire detonate on nearly every page. Every single character that matters (and there are many of them) is deeply imagined and fully rendered. Complex social situations are handled adroitly and in such a way that the reader is never at a loss as to context or meaning. Readers interested in experiencing death without actually having to die won't soon forget the novel's death scene. The language throughout the book is as beautiful and economical as that of a psalm.