When Angels Rest [Paperback]

Donald Harrington (Author), Donald Harington (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1999

By turns comic, sad, and violent, Donald Harington's tenth novel is a masterful work, part American tall tale, part hillbilly Paradiso.

During World War II, real news is a rare commodity in the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas. But twelve-year-old Dawny-inspired by his hero Ernie Pyle-finds enough local color to keep the townsfolk reading his weekly newspaper, the Stay Morning Star. Yet when soldiers come to occupy the remote hills of Stay More in training for an invasion of Japan, the world's war is brought closer to home, and the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed.

"Donald Harington's books are both unclassifiable and a genuine pleasure to read. There aren't enough writers like him." --The New York Times Book Review

"Harington believes so deeply in the place he's created, he's able to make us believe right along with him." --Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For decades, novelist Donald Harington has been assembling a piecemeal epic of the Ozarks. Most of the installments have revolved around the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas--a backwoods flyspeck that, like the genuine hamlets the author chronicled in Let Us Build Us a City, seems almost surreally removed from the American mainstream. And most of these books, including the superb Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, are supremely funny and observant fictions.

Both of these adjectives apply to When Angels Rest, which is Harington's equivalent of the Iliad, circa 1942. The narrator, 12-year-old Dawny, is an avid participant in an ongoing set of war games. "There were the top dogs," he tells us, "led by fat Burl Coe until he got drafted and by Sog Alan in his absence, who called themselves Allies, from the privilege of feeling and sometimes being superior ... and there were the underdogs, who did not chose to be called Axis but had no choice. I certainly did not elect to be an Axis, let alone a despised Jap, but it fell my lot by default." In addition to being a foot soldier, Dawny is also an aspiring Ernie Pyle, who cranks out The Stay Morning Star entirely under his own steam. His narrative of this scaled-down war, and of the doings of his fellow Stay Morons, is as memorable as it is amusing. True, Harrington's energy seems to flag in the latter half of the book, when actual, gun-toting GIs are parachuted into the Ozarks for maneuvers--the last thing these characters need is an injection of reality. But When Angels Rest remains a touching, highly textured fable of childhood's end, narrated in an Arkansan twang that is the author's finest invention. --Bob Brandeis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of Harington's (Butterfly Weed) fictional town of Stay More, Ark., will appreciate the latest escapades set in this quirky, backwater locale during WWII, where games of Allies and Axis warfare have replaced cowboys and Indians. In a place that distinguishes between only two social classes, "the poor, and the dirt poor," the town's young people fill their free time with battles, plots and counterplots as they watch Stay More's young men leave town for the real things. Twelve-year-old Dawny, inveterate observer and voyeur, writes up local events in his own weekly newspaper, the Stay Morning Star, while making frequent asides to his audience, "Gentle Reader," and offering amusing observations about the legendary antics of the Dinsmores, Dingletoons, Ingledews and Coes. The author's wit comes to the fore when an army detail lands in Stay More for Pacific theater training and the real war games escalate. Seen through Dawny, this is a poignant coming-of-age tale, not only for him and the town's young people but also for a nation whose innocence is sorely tested by the loss of a president and the harrowing events overseas that bring death close to home. Harington maintains the breezy originality that makes his 10th book a welcome addition to this talented writer's work.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430365
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430362
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,573,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Donald Harington was one of America's greatest writers of fiction. His fifteen novels have been called jubilant, lyrical, foxy, captivating, delicate, bawdy, playful, reckless, joyful, courageous. Set in the fictional hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas, Harington's stories blend myth, dreamscape and sharply observed speech and manners to depict a rich, eccentric, rural society. All fifteen novels--from the classic Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, to the redemptive Choiring of the Trees, the love story With and the concluding novel Enduring, published just two months before Mr. Harington's death-- are now available as The Complete Novels of Donald Harington, a must-have collection for all those who wish to read the very best, authentic, contemporary American writing.

"The quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary US letters." -Boston Globe

"Harington is hooked into the deepest traditions of storytelling, dipping his buckets directly into the well it all comes from, pursuing a literature dedicated not to documentation or self-expression, but to fascination, to lifting us out of ourselves and the dailiness of our lives -- to making our world again wondrous and large." --Los Angeles Times

"Totally satisfying... Harington reveres the most ordinary aspects of the lives of unexceptional people...he makes his joy infectious." --Time Magazine

Donald Harington (1935 -2009) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent nearly all of his childhood summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark dialect and the old tales told by local storytellers. He published his first novel in 1965, and fourteen more for a total of fifteen, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, loosely based on Drakes Creek. Acclaimed by critics as "an undiscovered continent," "America's Chaucer," and "one of the most powerful, subtle and inventive novelists in America," Harington was the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, and the Oxford American Lifetime Achievement Award.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical writing on how we witness war, love, and passion, January 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: When Angels Rest (Hardcover)

If you haven't tried Donald Harington's perceptive, word-musical, and searching fiction before, this new novel is an excellent place to start. You'll want to sample some of his other nine books when you're finished. He turns a small corner of Arkansas into a meeting point for universal themes and well-shaped characters.

Harington has used the "witness," as a commentator on the actions of others in his novels, to great effect elsewhere. In his "Some Other Place," a literate ghost narrates the actions of an inquiring pair of lovers -- even turning some of his observations into poetry. In what may be his strongest narrative, "The Choiring of the Trees," a story of a brutal miscarriage of justice is told in part through the sensibilities of a brilliant landscape artist.

This new novel becomes utterly captivating by fully carrying out Harington's "single ambition that motivates my work," which is "to make the reader part of the story." (Quoted in a newspaper story that I wrote about Harington. For the Web address, feel free to e-mail me.)

Here, the witness is neither a lively spirit nor an interpreting artist, but a young boy -- close in age and circumstance to Harington himself, but not quite. He becomes a voyeur, in the strictest sense of "one who sees." It's not strictly out of matters of sexuality, although Harington includes a sensitive coming-of-age plot for his 11-year-old protagonist.

Instead, young Donny is plunged into a whirlwind of changes that come with his small Arkansas town, Stay More (the venue for all of Harington's novels), being finally touched early in 1945 by the long arm of World War II.

All that is left in the single street of Stay More are the children, with the men at war and the women tending homes. They have re-created the war through two rival play-gangs, but never quite connect with what the real "Allies" and "Axis" are perpetrating abroad.

Donny comes closest, by following his admiration for war journalist Ernie Pyle into creating a gel-printed "newspaper" for tiny Stay More. The irony in his being so observant of events is that none really happen ... that is, until the hollow unexpectedly becomes the site for an Army training maneuver, and Donny is not allowed (at first) to write fully about it. Events soon overtake both the town children and the visiting soldiers, with tragedies that go beyond anyone's capacity to observe or to report.

The irony is redoubled by how Harington shows a sad universal fact of growing up: Donny's journey of learning about budding sexuality, mutability, and death is far more worth his reporting than what he tries to eke out in writing his free newspaper, but he doesn't grasp this until he's suffered many personal losses.

What in turn enfolds all of these events is a conscious involvement of the reader, in the words (and even actions) requested on the part of the young narrator. Harington is not subtle about this, and it is part of the novel's charm. One isn't simply reading about a young boy marveling at the girl he loves bathing in a brook ... one is pulled into being present at that moment of tremulous discovery.

In the same way, a literally deafening experience at the novel's climax is translated into the harsh music of words. Harington has done this before, most fully in his "Lightning Bug," but never with the sounds inside one's head, and he shows yet more mastery of the power of language.

Once you dip your toe into Swains Creek, the fickle stream that runs through Stay More, you'll want to come back. Harington's other books have spun its history (back to the 1840s), passions, stark choices about life and death, and slow decline. He's told these stories through chronicle, allegory, meditation, memoir, tall tales, analysis, and now "reporting." All of this examination of one stretch of earth has made it a locus for universal truths. It's also been the spark for compelling writing. Try it for yourself!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a remarkable, ambitious novel by an imaginative writer, September 22, 1998

By 

[e-mail] "a big fan of this book" (Lexington, Kentucky) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Angels Rest (Hardcover)

Dawny, an inquisitive, sensitive boy, is the narrator of this enchanting novel set in the small town of Stay More in the Ozarks of Arkansas during World War II. A journalist himself, Dawny dreams of becoming the next Ernie Pyle, and it is his unique voice, that of observer and writer, which hold the reader spellbound from begining to end of this sweetly comic yet also darkly frightening tale. The children of Stay More, dividing themselves into two rival groups, the Allies and the Axis, become in Donald Harington's skilled hands a microcosm of what's going on in the war overseas. While the world loses its innocence to the cruelties of war, Stay More's children also begin to lose their innocence. The golden glow of childhood disappears beneath the dark shadow of approaching adulthood. Powerful in its impact, When Angels Rest is a remarkable, ambitious novel. A fanciful and imaginative writer, Harington draws his characters with love, ultimately showing us--his "Gentle Readers"--how we need to love the world if we truly want to save it. P.S. I am so glad that I, once again, ignored Kirkus and gave this fine novel a chance.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable, ambitious novel by an imaginative writer, September 15, 1998

By 

[e-mail] "a big fan of this book" (Lexington, Kentucky) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Angels Rest (Hardcover)

An inquisitive, sensitive boy, called Dawny, is the narrator of this enchanting novel set in the small town of Stay More in the Ozarks of Arkansas during World War II. A journalist himself, Dawny dreams of becoming the next Ernie Pyle, and it is his unique voice, that of observer and writer, which holds the reader spellbound from beginning to end of this sweetly comic yet also darkly frightening tale. The children of Stay More, dividing themselves into two rival groups, the Allies and the Axis, become in Don Harington's skilled hands, a microcosm of what's going on in the war overseas. While the world loses its innocence to the cruelties of war, Stay More's children also begin to lose their innocence. The golden glow of childhood disappears beneath the dark shadow of approaching adulthood. Powerful in its impact, "When Angels Rest" is a remarkable, ambitious novel. A fanciful and imaginative writer, Harington draws his character with love, ultimately showing us -- his "Gentle Readers"-- how we need to love the world if we truly want to save it. P.S. I am so glad that I once again ignored the typical Kirkus "comments" and took a chance on this wonderful novel!