Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great inchoate love haunts this fine pastoral novel, November 11, 2007
In 1973 one of our nation's finest novelists, the late John Gardner, made high art out of obscure people living through trials of despair, betrayal and religious doubt in New York State's Catskill Mountains. Although Nickel Mountain slipped out of print, it's back live, thanks to New Directions' republication of such Gardner triumphs as October Light.
Nickel Mountain never received the acclaim of some of Gardner's other books, particularly Grendel, which remains in print, but it deserves to be back on the shelf. For in it Gardner has conjured majestic mystery out of seemingly ordinary rural people and landscapes.
It's 1954, and Henry Soames, 40-plus, overweight and suffering from a life-threatening heart condition, runs a diner where truckers and local farmers gather. Soon after 17-year-old Callie Wells starts working there, she becomes pregnant by Willard, a boy in whose love she had trusted. He zooms away to college, though, unreachable, leaving Callie in big trouble. She and Henry come to know and help each other; they agree to marry. Is there love? Of a sort.
Also much distress. Things Callie says in the throes of childbirth wound Henry. His heart is already damaged on more than one level: Great mountain of a man, he harbors inside a great inchoate love for people alongside a great rage at his inability to express it.
After Jimmy is born, the marriage is strained when Henry agrees to provide a home for a half-mad, Scripture-quoting Jehovah's Witness whose house has burned down, killing his wife. When the man comes under suspicion, a sense of nameless dread pervades the mountain like the fogs that descend through the trees at evening. Callie tells Henry she's scared.
" `Of what?' he said, exasperated.
" `How do I know?' she said. `I'm just scared, that's all. Really. Aren't you?' "
Henry realizes he is, because despite our boundless protectiveness for loved ones, in the end we can't protect them. His bitter, lonely friend George Loomis points this out, he who loses his arm in a grisly farm accident. The Jehovah's Witness is caught scaring Jimmy with tales of the Devil. Henry confronts him, with disastrous results.
Loss pervades this tale. People destroy each other, or themselves, without meaning to. A mysterious, itinerant Goat Lady driving a pink-and-purple cart comes on the scene, looking for her lost son, only to vanish. Terrible drought sets in. Henry sinks deeper into himself, ill-advisedly eating and gaining weight. Willard returns, not sure if he's looking for his lost son or not.
Redemption eventually raises its voice in the oppressive silences. By no means is it easily won, and it seems just out of the reach of articulation. Henry "had no words for his thoughts; the very separateness of words was contrary to what he seemed to know." But new life arises in the wilderness of the Catskills and the heart.
No cheap sentiment or smooth pieties in this novel. It shimmers with hints of Christmas and gardens and spirit without trying to direct us. "A Pastoral Novel" is the book's subtitle: pastoral in both rural and ministerial senses. We sense the urgent darkness of the soul. The final scene in a graveyard is by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, suggesting that in John Gardner's brilliant vision, life and death are not what they may seem to be.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Hauntingly beautiful, it stays with you forever.", January 17, 1999
By A Customer
I read Nickel Mountain" for the first time over 20 year ago, and it has never left my life. The characters in this book touch your heart and soul for a liftime. This novel transports you to another space in time. Mr. Gardner has a way with words that enables you to "feel" and "smell" the fragrant night air of the Catskill Mountains of New York State. Hauntingly beautiful, it stirs your soul. Give yourself the gift of a lifetime, read "Nickel Mountain." John Gardner has been given a gift from God.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoy it like a feast and read it slowly ., June 29, 1999
The characters in this evocative book are inseparable from the pure texture of the unforgiving landscape in which they exist. Although their struggle concerns each one's individual search for love and acceptance, they ultimately acknowledge their situation for what it is; coming to peace with their own strengths and limitations. This book is truly a feast. I have found that it is to be savored by reading a chapter or two a week, allowing time in between courses to catch my breath. John Gardner was a writer without peer and I wonder what he would be producing today, nearly twenty years after his death.
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