Fourth of July Creek (Henderson)

Fourth of July Creek 
Smith Henderson, 2014
HarperCollins
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062286444


Summary
After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face-to-face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times.

But as Pete's own family spins out of control, Pearl's activities spark the full-blown interest of the FBI, putting Pete at the center of a massive manhunt from which no one will emerge unscathed.

In this shattering and iconic American novel, Smith Henderson explores the complexities of freedom, community, grace, suspicion, and anarchy, brilliantly depicting our nation's disquieting and violent contradictions. Fourth of July Creek is an unforgettable, unflinching debut that marks the arrival of a major literary talent. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1972-73
• Where—state of Montana, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Montana; M.A., University of Texas
• Awards—PEN Emerging Writer Award; Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon


Smith Henderson is the recipient of the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award in fiction. He was a Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University, a Pushcart Prize winner, and a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Born and raised in Montana, he now lives in Portland, Oregon. (From the publisher.)

More
Mr. Henderson comes from a long line of Montana cowboys, sheep herders and dynamiters. He was the first person in his immediate family to attend college. His parents married in high school and his father worked as a logger. He was able to afford college because his mother died of lung disease when he was 19, leaving him with insurance money. In what he calls "a fit of pure vocational idiocy," he majored in classics, and studied Latin and Greek at the University of Montana. He took the first paying job he could get out of college at a group home for juveniles in Missoula, working 36-hour weekend shifts. Like his protagonist, Mr. Henderson worked with children who had been through "massive abuse of every kind, extreme neglect, death, murders, every dark thing you could ever think could happen happened," he said.

He left the job after a couple of years and patched together a living from odd writing jobs. He worked in internal corporate communications for Apple and wrote for the chancellor's office at the University of Texas, working on his fiction on the side. He started working as a copywriter for Wieden+Kennedy in Portland in 2010. (Excerpt from Wall St. Journal.)

Book Reviews
[T]his not-to-be-missed first novel…is a Rorschach test of sorts. It may remind readers of many different writers, even though it's such an original. Mr. Henderson has prompted comparisons to a long list of novelists who've written about grim, hardscrabble lives in eloquent prose…a mix of Richard Ford's writing style with characters by Richard Russo. I'd add that there is much of early Russell Banks in Pete's keen awareness of his failings and desperate yearning for the decency that remains just out of reach. And there are hints of [another] bolt-from-the-blue debut: David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008). This book is far darker…But its gripping story and shimmering sense of the natural world do bring that great debut to mind.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


[Cormac] McCarthy’s shadow may loom heavy across the prose...but the story this prose conveys, and the manner in which Henderson unfurls it, bears its own unalloyed power.... Henderson butters his characters with great gobs of compassion; only a few characters are denied extenuating circumstances for their sins and degradations.... If there’s a punching bag here, it’s the arrogance of societal strictures, which Henderson swings at by exploring the friction of the so-called greater good clashing with the individual good. As the title suggests, this is a book about freedom, and not unlike Jonathan Franzen’s novel about the same subject, it seeks to map the moral limits of freedom—that border ground where one person’s freedoms infringe upon another’s.
Jonathan Miles - New York Times Book Review


The best book I’ve read so far this year...Henderson choreographs these parts so masterfully that the novel is never less than wholly engaging… All week I was looking for opportunities to slip back into these pages and follow the trials of this rural social worker.... Henderson knows how to create the sensation that we’re being propelled through a story that’s just as poignant as it is frightening. Infused with psychological complexity and lush with the landscape of the Northwest, the novel barrels along with the chaotic demands of Pete’s job and family, from crisis to crisis to quiet scenes of despair.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Breathtaking...heartbreaking…Henderson’s immersive, colorful style makes this scenic journey worthwhile. He’s a curious kind of hard-boiled poet—part Raymond Chandler, part Denis Johnson.
Entertainment Weekly


This uneven debut, set in 1980 Montana, isn’t always able to sustain the interest of its opening sections. The first chapter introduces us to social worker Pete Snow, who has been called by the police to defuse a domestic dispute.... Snow’s efforts to help the Pearls despite the father’s hostility are the focus of the book, which is too long and features an unsatisfying ending.
Publishers Weekly


Graced with powerful characters and beautifully focused writing, Henderson's epic debut hit my desk the day a critic friend buttonholed me at an awards event to tell me that it was something special.... [I]t features social worker Pete Snow, increasingly dismayed with his job until he meets scrawny, untamed, 11-year-old Benjamin Pearl, whose crazy survivalist father is anticipating some kind of apocalypse.
Library Journal


(Starred review.)First-novelist Henderson not only displays an uncanny sense of place...he also creates an incredibly rich cast of characters, from Pete’s drunken, knuckleheaded friends to the hard-luck waitress who serves him coffee to the disturbed, love-sick survivalist. Dark, gritty, and oh so good. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist


[D]eep-turning plot twists [in a book about] a man looking for meaning in his own life while trying to help others too proud and mistrustful to receive that assistance. The story goes on a bit long, but the details are just right: It's expertly written and without a false note...in imagining a rural West that's seen better days—and perhaps better people, too.
Kirkus Reviews

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