The Easter House by David Rhodes
My rating: 4/5 cats
Yes, he was a miner, and was raised by woodsmen, protestant Protestants who had an ax-handle way of dealing with problems, to whom morality was not much more than fierce, communal bigotry, and who taught him to respect pain and avoid punishment and seek solace through physical exhaustion, and that any solace he might find even in that was was to be ashamed of because it indicated weakness—people who would never realize that difficulties were anything more than hunger, cold, and sprained muscles.
if only the whole book were so clear-eyed and grounded. yeah, i gave it four stars cats, but it is a tentative four. the parts that are good give me super-shivers, but there is a lot that makes you work a bit more more than the payoff deserves.
i think if this novel had had a more traditional shape, i would have loved it with five-star cat love, but its structure, although elegant, is also fragile, and hard to see all at once. this is a good book to try and read all in one go, because the book is porous: time weaves, and answers are doled out at rhodes’ discretion, tantalizing the reader with fears of “are we ever going to find out about thus-and-such??”
mostly you are, but he shore does take his time.
meanwhile, a story does indeed spin itself. but how to describe it??
Isn’t that about all that goes on over there anyway? C and his brother sitting around with the rest of the town gossiping, while the rest of his family goes mad?
that is one way. but there is much too much to cover in one of my crappy little reviews.
roughly, it is about a man, “c.” who establishes a junkyard on his deceased father’s property and moves here with his wife, cell, where they have two sons, glove and baron. (the names in this book are extraordinary) c. does not sell his junk, he lives off of the barter system and resists the concept of money. so people come from far and wide to trade with him, and only objects of the same general size and weight are acceptable trade. the yard also becomes a place for men to congregate, playing horseshoes and shooting the breeze. eventually, “the associate” forms; a group of these men who hire themselves out to fix problems. and that’s where it starts going down a treacherous path.
a lot happens in this book.
you will learn about the ruined reputation of c’s father, and of the sociopathic and disfigured creature he rescued from a sideshow. you will watch the easter family descend into madness or redemption, as the case may be. you will witness small-town jealousies and the extent to which these can fester into a hatred from which there is only one solution.you will watch terrible decisions being made.
and usually, the prose is teasingly gorgeous:
Fisher looked up to the third floor of the house, hoping to see The Baron staring out of a window, wrenching against his chains. Then he said goodbye to Glove and began walking home. Had Fisher been older, he might have wondered why several years ago half of Ontarion seemed to live at Easter’s Yard, spending days and nights inside the giant house and out into the Yard—why in the summer full-grown men, without drinking or playing cards, would gather at Easter’s Yard and watch the colored time move through the afternoons. He might have wondered why today no one went there—why even though the Easters and the other three men there were “good people,” as his father called them, no one would go there…except at night. He might have wondered what The Associate was—what it had been and what it was now. But if Fisher had been older, he would have known these things. He might then have wondered about the killing and the money.
i mostly loved this book, but i just think it suffered a little bit in the style he chose for the story.
i feel like he is an excellent writer, harming himself by trying to be a little too experimental.
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