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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
To be young, gifted, and growing up in the American West, July 23, 2004
The author, born in 1909, was in his mid-30s when this novel was published in 1945, and he writes about being young with remarkable maturity. There is a melancholy and nostalgia, as if the story were told by someone twice his age. In its leisurely and intense unfolding of time, place, mood and character, it brings to mind Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" and Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie."
Modern-day readers will find themselves making a big adjustment to the pace of this long novel. Its central story could be told in 250 pages: a sensitive boy grows up in a modest family in Reno, Nevada, befriends a girl who lives near him and a boy and girl whose parents are wealthy and live across town, falls deeply in love with one of the girls while in high school, and begins a career as a composer and musician, eventually marrying and finding himself as an artist. But Clark has much more to tell, immersing the reader in richly detailed incidents that can expand into 20 and 30 pages - a horse race, a high school party, a tennis match, a climb up a mountain, a gathering of locals at a bar.
While the story takes place in the 1920s and 30s, there are only passing references to historical events and period detail. Much of the story is internal, psychological, emotional. And much of the story has to do with the timelessness of place and the cycle of seasons. There is a celebration of the city of Reno (as a hometown, not a destination for gambling and easy divorce), its trees, the surrounding mountains, and nearby Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Emotions and landscape are intricately interwoven. Clark's descriptions of places are infused with moods that shift and change like passing cloud shadows.
And finally, it's a story of the difficulties of becoming an artist, finding one's own voice and vision, developing one's talent, the personal costs and the struggle against discouragement and compromise, the social isolation and the impact on personal relationships. Part of Clark's achievement in this novel is the ability to take the reader with only words into the mind of a musician and composer. I recommend reading this book with an open map of Reno and western Nevada, and look online for pictures of Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Both will enrich the experience of this fine novel.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, January 28, 2000
Having grown up around Reno, Nevada, I have a built-in bias toward this book, despite the fact that it is an example of a treacly genre (the obligatory semi-autobiographical novel) that most authors wisely leave in manuscript in their desk drawers. However, Clark is a powerful writer (see "The Track of the Cat" and "The Ox-Bow Incident") and he does a very good job of evoking time and place, especially the 20's and 30's, which are written as Fitzgerald might have done if Gatsby had grown up in Reno. The latter part of the book contains descriptions of artistic troubled souls loose in the American West that will be familiar to readers of the novels of the Beat Generation (Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" comes to mind). There is also a Steinbeckian flavor to the book, especially the relationships, possibly because they are etched against that larger-than-life Western sky.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Reno, Nevada Resident's Review, July 18, 2001
While a resident of Reno, NV (1971-1980), I read the "City of Trembling Leaves" The book is a wonderfully nostalgic record of Reno, Nevada and the surrounding mountain and desert environs during the period of time that Clark lived there (i.e. 1920-1940's). The author paints a colorful and accurate description of the "Biggest Little City in the World" when it actually fit that definition. Today, Reno is a rapidly expanding, land-gobbling monster of massive traffic jams, casinos, commercial strips, malls and ticky-tacky,cluttered housing developments much like Las Vegas (which is nothing more than another Los Angeles with slot machines). I have lost my original copy, but am buying the new edition so that I can once again enjoy the life of a young, callow fellow and his friends growing up in a beautiful, small, friendly western town during simpler times.
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