Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson
My rating: 4/5 cats
“We’re not that bad…People fuck up. They get forgiven.”
optimism is nice, but it’s one thing to tell yourself that, and another to live in the real world.
pete snow lives in the real world. he works for the montana department of family services, where his territory covers a huge swathe of the rural backwoods of the state. the year is 1980, but there is a timelessness to this remote and undeveloped country which leaves its inhabitants untouched, somewhat exempt from the world at large.
pete bears witness to damaged families and the failures of the underfunded system as he encounters violence, drugs, child neglect and abuse, shotguns, poorly-trained dogs, trailers, and poverty on a daily basis.
at first, he seems to have an unflappable and professional mien – competent and good-intentioned, but as the plot progresses, we begin to see the strain his job is putting on him as his own life begins to unravel.
pete has been separated from his wife beth for some time when she suddenly announces that she is moving to texas and taking their thirteen-year-old daughter rachel with her. although not entirely to blame for the breakdown of the marriage, pete knows he has failed his family, and that he had, in some sort of misplaced attempt at atonement, ultimately sacrificed his relationship with them in order to channel his energies into rescuing other fractured families, a tactic his bitter daughter has noticed.
after they leave, pete drowns himself in alcohol and work and falls into the same excesses as many of his clients. adding to his personal problems are his brother luke, who is on the lam after assaulting his parole officer wes, who keeps visiting pete looking for luke and making veiled threats, the death of pete’s estranged father, a boozy new romance with a troubled young woman named mary, and a self-destructive slide, falling into the bad habits of his youth.
in texas, beth is falling into her own bad habits, exposing rachel to her increasingly debauched lifestyle, and putting her in danger. when rachel runs away, it’s the final contribution to this perfect storm of trouble in which pete struggles to maintain control.
into this storm wanders ben, a scrawny, near-feral eleven year old, who has been raised deep in the hills by his dangerous father jeremiah, who has been filling his head with his paranoid conspiracy theories and old testament bombast, while they await the end times. pete and jeremiah form a precarious relationship as pete tries to overcome jeremiah’s mistrust to get food and medicine to ben.
pete is state-hopping trying to find his daughter, dealing with the difficult case of a seemingly unplaceable boy named cecil, dodging wes, trekking through the wilderness to keep tabs on ben and jeremiah, learning too much about mary, and drinking drinking drinking. throughout all these various pressures his professionalism begins to falter as he repeatedly witnesses the shortcomings of the system, and he becomes increasingly erratic, bending the rules to try to salvage just one thing in his unstable situation. but things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, to misquote some yeats.
this all sounds very complicated, and it is, but the book’s elements work smoothly together as the stories ebb and flow over one another, merging in unexpected ways. breaking up the chapters of pete and those he is trying to help, we have a series of interviews between rachel and an unknown interlocutor, and we learn about the consequences of her reckless decisions.
this is not a tidy story. you are allowed to see what you’re allowed to see, and no more, as several characters are taken to a certain point without true closure. i love this technique, although it might be frustrating to some readers.
there are so many fantastic scenes which will resonate with me for a long time: ben’s repulsive feet, the mount st. helens story, the story of the rest of the pearl family, the way pete’s father died, pete’s lament “I take kids away from people like us.”… it’s all phenomenal and lasting.
i would have liked a little more clarity in the scenes of rachel’s interview, though. i was never sure if it was a real interview or some kind of ongoing series of diary entries. there were too many times where the interviewer knew too many specific personal details for it to be an actual interview, but it was an important perspective to contribute to the other stories of children in dire situations.
overall, a fantastic debut with a broader and more sensitive viewpoint than typical in grit lit. write more books, please!
