Book Reviews

• The Spectacular Now

  • from Publishers Weekly - November 17, 2008

    STARRED REVIEW

    Unlike most high school seniors, Sutter Keely—the narrator of this smart, superbly written novel—is not concerned with the future. He's the life of the party, and he's interested in the "Spectacular Now." In stream of consciousness–style prose, Sutter describes his lurching from one good time to the next: he carries whiskey in a flask, and once it's mixed into his 7Up, anything is possible. He will jump into the pool fully clothed, climb up a tree and onto his ex-girlfriend's roof or cruise around all hours of the night. Without ever deviating from the voice of the egocentric Sutter, Tharp (Knights of the Hill Country) fully develops all of the ancillary characters, such as socially awkward Aimee, the new girlfriend who tries to plan a future with this quintessential live-for-the-moment guy. Readers will be simultaneously charmed and infuriated by Sutter as his voice holds them in thrall to his all-powerful Now. Ages 14-up.

    
    
    

  • from Richie's Picks

    Well, darkness has a hunger that's insatiable. — Emily Saliers

    Forget the dark things. Take a drink and let time wash them away to wherever time washes things away to. — Sutter Keely

    THE SPECTACULAR NOW is such an achingly humor-filled, intensely sad story, that it has taken me a couple of days of processing the emotions it stirred up before being able to talk about Sutter Keely. Having previously included KNIGHTS OF THE HILL COUNTRY (Tharp's previous book for teens) on my Best of 2006 list, I was well aware of the author's abilities, but this second book is Something Else. It is one that absolutely should be added to high school collections and to required reading lists for YA Lit students.

    High school senior Sutter Keely is great friends with a long line of ex-girlfriends. He has a superb sense of humor, plays well with his peers, is forever the life of the party, and professes his affinity for embracing the weird. But as his latest relationship crumbles, he asks himself, Why is it that girls like me so much but never love me. And, of course, as we come to learn, it is the damaged young alcoholic himself, and not the girls, who has the real problem. Or a number of real problems.

    But then he has a chance pre-dawn meeting with a girl he's never noticed who is so unlike his partying crowd:

    She jerks back, startled to see me move. "You're alive," she says. "I thought maybe you were dead."

    I'm like, "I don't think I'm dead." But right now I can't exactly be sure of anything. "Where the hell am I?"

    'You're in the middle of the yard," she says. "Do you know someone who lives here?"

    I sit up and look at the house—an ugly, little, pink brick one with a window air-conditioner unit. "No, I never saw it before."

    "Were you in a wreck or something?"

    "Not that I know of, Why? Where's my car?"

    "Is it one of those?" She points toward the street where two cars are parked along the curb on our side and a junky white pickup is parked on the other side. The pickup's engine is idling so I guess it must be hers.

    "No, I drive a Mitsubishi," I say. "Jesus, I must have gone to sleep." I look around, trying to gather my wits a little. A scraggly elm tree hangs over us and you can just see the moon through the branches. There's a rickety lawn chair stationed in the middle of the yard, and two beer cans lie in the grass a couple of feet away. I vaguely remember sitting in that lawn chair at some point, but I don't remember how I got there.

    "So," she asks. "You don't know where you left your car?"

    "Let me think for a second," I say, but my head's not really up for thinking. "No, it's no good. I don't remember where it is. Maybe I parked it at home and just went out for a walk."

    She shakes her head. "No, I don't think you live in this neighborhood, Sutter."

    That surprises the hell out of me right there. "How did you know my name? Were we talking a while ago or something?"

    "We go to the same high school," she says, but she doesn't say it like I'm an idiot. She has a kind voice, kind eyes. She looks at me like I'm a bird she found with a broken wing.

    Fellow senior Aimee Finecky has struggled to create order amidst the chaos that permeates her home life. She sees the path out of town and she has attained the grades necessary to head there. She has created a sanctuary of a bedroom. And then, as she completes her mother's nocturnal paper route alone — while mom is off to the Indian casino — she finds her schoolmate Sutter passed out in that front yard. So begins the story of Sutter and Aimee.

    "Oh yeah." I take a long pull on the martini. "Childhood was a fantastic country to live in."

    There is so much more to this tale. For instance, Sutter's observations on the superficiality of the interaction taking place at his married sister's party — in contrast to what he's experienced in hanging with his friends — are hysterically funny and incredibly thought provoking. And Sutter's friend Ricky's meditations upon the longing desire for the miraculous, the role of drugs and alcohol in trying to resurrect the miraculous, and the built-in obsolescence that causes such remedies to ultimately fail when they are relied upon for filling the emptiness, are the kind of jaw-dropping amazing introspections that are so rarely developed to such an exquisite degree in young adult literature.

    THE SPECTACULAR NOW impacted me so emotionally that I couldn't even think about reading something else for a few days.

    This stage in the life of the buzz is truly fabulous. It's not even a buzz anymore. It's a roar. The world opens up and everything's yours right here, right now. You've probably heard the expression — All good things must come to an end. Well, this stage in the life of the buzz never heard anything close to that. This stage says, "I will never end, I am indestructible. I will last fabulously forever." And, of course, you believe it. To hell with tomorrow. To hell with all problems and barriers. Nothing matters but the Spectacular Now.

    —Richie Partington

• Knights of the Hill Country

  • from School Library Journal

    Grade 8 Up—Teachers don't recognize his smarts, he struggles with his mothers unsuccessful romantic relationships, and he is unsure of himself around girls, but when senior football star Hampton Green is on the field, everything clicks. His Oklahoma team, the Kennisaw Knights, has a five-year winning streak they are trying to take to the record books by securing the state championship one more time. Hamptons best friend, Blaine, has a shallow relationship with the prettiest girl in school and tries to drag Hampton into a similar stereotypical dating scene. Hampton, however, finds himself attracted to self-assured, intelligent Sara, whom Blaine says is not good for his image. As the championship unfolds, things get tense, and Blaine drags Hampton into a confrontation with an enemy from the opposing team, during which Blaine pulls a gun and Hampton must finally assert himself. The teens voice comes in loud and clear, revealing a sensitive, likable character. Hamptons budding romance with Sara is touching and adds an interesting dimension. The conquering of insecurities and gradual self-realization Hampton experiences are reminiscent of Bert Bowden in Terry Daviss If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (Delacorte, 1992), and readers will root as much for his team as for Hampton to be true to himself. The dynamic football scenes will draw readers who enjoyed H. G. Bissingers Friday Night Lights (Da Capo, 2000). The covers hazy silhouette of a football player reflects the strong character inside who will eventually bring his own hazy life into focus.

    —Diane P. Tuccillo, City of Mesa Library, AZ

    Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
    
    

  • from Booklist

    In the hill country of Oklahoma, where high-school football ranks next to God and country, and truth be known, sometimes came in first, Hampton Green is a star linebacker of the Kennisaw Knights, and he feels the weight of carrying on his team's fifth undefeated season like one hell of a big sack of rocks. Things are heavy at home, too, where he often finds his single mother with a new guy. Blaine is Hamp's teammate and best friend, but he doesn't understand Hamp's interest in Sara, whose wild hair and baggy clothes separate her from the football players' girlfriends. Tharp's debut novel is a sensitive portrait of small-town life and a young athlete's growing awareness that he is more than just the sport he plays so well. Taut scenes on the football field and the dilemmas about choosing what feels right over what's expected are all made memorable by Hamp's unforgettable, colloquial voice, which speaks about feelings and football with the same unwavering, fully realized personality. A moving, sensitive debut from a writer to watch.

    —Gillian Engberg

    
    
    

  • from Richie's Picks:KNIGHTS OF THE HILL COUNTRY, October 19, 2006

    What is this world coming to? Two football stories worth my talking about in the same year? What is next — me out there barbecuing tofu at a tailgate party?

    Back when Hampton Green was nine years old, his father abandoned the family. Hampton and his mom had moved downstate to a modest rental in Kennisaw, Oklahoma. Mom landed a job in a store and, in the ensuing years, has gone through a series of boyfriends. During those years she has never been there emotionally for Hampton.

    Hampton's salvation since moving to Kennisaw had been his long friendship with Blaine Keller. A generation ago Blaine's dad had been part of the Kennisaw Knights high school football team that went undefeated for five straight years. Blaine and his dad taught Hampton the game of football and now the two friends are seniors and stars on this generation's miracle Knights team, aiming at completing their own fifth undefeated season to match that legendary streak of the past.

    But Blaine has been trying to hide from the adults how badly his knee was injured in a game at the end of the previous season. It becomes painfully clear to us that the increasingly bitter Blaine Keller — with his unforgiving father on his back — is not going to achieve the greatness beyond high school that he's got all his chips riding on. Meanwhile, the big, redheaded, six foot-four Hampton is only getting better as he continues to develop his unmatched intuitive sense of the game.

    Unfortunately, Hampton doesn't have the same intuitive sense when it comes to school assignments or to talking with girls. But on the plus side, despite being in the position to ride Blaine's coattails and consort with the most popular girls at school, Hampton has developed a quiet admiration for a shy yet articulate girl with baggy clothes named Sara Reynolds whom, thanks to her wild hair, the popular kids scathingly refer to as Bush Girl.

    It is Sara who has some important things to teach Hampton.

    Darnell didn't see how nobody with an ounce of brains could fight for the Confederates and Lana said she had ancestors that was on the South's side and they was fighting for a way of life and old-fashion family values.

    Darnell turned over to me. "Can you believe this girl, Hamp? You explain it to her. I'm wore out."

    "I don't know that much about it," I said. looking down. Last thing I wanted to do was get balled up in a controversy. As good of a fighter as I was on the football field, I hated a argument in civilian life. Darnell was my best friend after Blaine and he was black, so I wasn't about to take the South's side, but I didn't want to hurt Lana's feelings neither. Besides, I didn't know but what Sara might have some relatives from the South somewheres along the line too.

    Darnell threw up his hands. "How about you Sara? You're smart. Let me ask you. Was slavery wrong?"

    "Of course," she said.

    "Well, then, let me ask you another thing. What reason could anyone have for fighting on a side that wants to own slaves?"

    Sara was quiet for a moment, her long lashes shading down over her eyes. "Well," she said finally, "I guess a lot of folks want to be part of a side so much they just go along with what their side says is right."

    "Even when it's really wrong," Darnell threw in.

    "That's just it," Sara said. "Some people don't know who they really are themselves, so how are they going to know what they think is right or wrong?"

    One of the seminal themes in young adult literature involves adolescent characters learning to speak, and to speak up, as they create their own voices and identities. Hampton's innocence and blind loyalty to Blaine have totally impeded his ability to develop that individual identity and voice, but with the end of high school in sight we are rooting loudly for this big, goodhearted Oklahoma kid with his "durns," "done alreadys," and folksy metaphors, to heed Sara's lessons and become his own person.

    —Richie Partington

    
    
    

• Falling Dark

  • from Boston Globe

    Tim Tharp's Falling Dark is a version and a vision of pastoral. It is not an idealized pastoral of the past, even the recent past, though a young boy in a small Oklahoma town dreams of visiting a farm, and a friend of his, a young African-American boy, does go to visit relatives who live on a farm.

    The town has a past you can glimpse beyond the blacktop and the neon detritus of "civilization." Once, 20 years ago, there was a commune where the Sunshine People expected to find themselves in nature and nature in themselves. It didn't work out that way; only an old geodesic dome still stands, down by the pond on Sam Casey's place.

    Life is rough and limited in this part of the world. The Git-N-Go sign shines on, and there's a Dairy Queen, a gas station, some sagging rent houses, a bar, a pizza palace, and a lot of broken dreams.

    Donna Bless works checkout at the grocery store. Since her husband was gunned down by some crazy teenagers, she's been trying to hold things together for her two sons, Wesley and Nelson, boys who haven't been spoiled yet by the world they're in. It's an uphill battle: Donna has a generous heart, but she also has a problem. Despite her best intentions, she drinks way more than a little bit too much. A friend says, coaxingly,

    "One little beer never did anybody any harm."

    "I don't know," Donna said.

    But she did know. She knew all about it.

    The friend's efforts to fix Donna up with a new man end up in an attempted rape. She is rescued by Roy Dale, who is not exactly a knight in shining armor; he moves into her life, and she accepts him there because she's lonely, but the situation is no good, and she knows it.

    Roy is a drifter and a liar and, it turns out, a smalltime drug dealer. There's a sizable marijuana crop growing out there at Sam's, and Roy isn't above stealing some of the stash and taking it in his pickup to Tulsa to do some business.

    Other characters who come into the story include Sam's daughter Melinda and Melinda's friend Jennifer, who is a wild one, out of control, and it turns out she has plenty of reason to be. You know, it's like I said, Melinda observes, she's the oldest friend I have and my father always told me you have your regular family and then you have the one you find along the way and that's how it is with Jennifer and me. She might not always act like I think she should, and I'll let her know it, too, but I'm still going to try to be the same kind of friend I'd want for myself.

    Melinda is a good person in an environment that doesn't seem to care one way or the other about anything good. Wesley and Nelson are good, too, and in different ways, Sam and Donna, who have seen a lot more of life, are still trying to be good. It's a struggle, as even the pure of heart learn. Ragel, the black boy, tells a kid on a minibike who wants to beat him up, You know what's the matter with you. ... People treat you like trash, and so you have to go around treating other people like trash. My daddy told me about that, he told me all about what makes people like you. Even little Nelson has a bedtime epiphany. Nelson lay his head back on the pillow then and that was something he never knew. He never knew how you could grow up to understand the world less than you did before.

    The author understands the world and this particular place very well. Tharp grew up in Henryetta, Okla., and (according to a brief biography printed at the end of the book) explored the United States by thumb and pickup truck before experimenting with a variety of jobs. Now, he teaches at Oklahoma State University in Okmulgee.

    Falling Dark won Milkweed Press's national fiction prize, and it deserves to. Tharp is an economical writer, uncannily sensitive to the poetry of ordinary speech, but never soft at the center. He makes the reader slow down and listen. Donna pictured Sam Casey again, the way she had done since seeing him on her front porch that night, standing there half-turned, like a door that was just opening in front of her. That kind of precise language recalls some of the miracles in the early work of Larry Woiwode, a writer of a different region.

    When, finally, Tharp writes about hope, as writers of pastoral always do, you have to believe him, because he knows all there is to know about despair.

    —Richard Dyer

    
    
    

  • from Austin Chronicle

    Tim Tharp's novel Falling Dark won the prestigious Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and rightly so; it is a beautifully rendered story of our bleak times which manages to leave the reader with a much-welcome whisper of hope for our shared condition. The novel is an inventory of the heartland in both senses of the word — the great America between the happening coasts and the affective territories of our own hearts and lives.

    Tharp knows his part of the world: the small towns and rural corners of Oklahoma and the folks who dwell there, working the night shift at the convenience store and holding second jobs stacking hay or loading trucks or whatever meager industry the season may offer. They live in tumble-down trailers and unpainted houses with sagging porches set well back off gravel roads. Behold America far from the nearest Starbucks and rumor of the latest IPO.

    In this bleak and commonplace environment, a grieving widow tries to rear her two sons while coping with her own need for rum bottle comfort on a steady basis. One boy is on the cusp of manhood, furtively sipping those first illicit beers and trying to learn to handle desire while tossing on the roiling sea of hormones. The other boy is still an imaginative child switching from a keen awareness of the paucity of his life and his imaginary efforts to save the universe. Tharp renders the latter with brilliant subtlety.

    Along the way, his tale examines the small-time marijuana grower, the epidemic of alcohol abuse, and the alienation and despair which is the fabric of many American lives right in the middle of our historic financial boom as a nation. Distribution is everything.

    This novel is a substantial achievement and, despite its dark tone, the reader is offered a clue about the palliative and redemptive value of honest relationships. It limns a world not often depicted in fiction.

    —Tom Doyal

    
    
    

  • from San Francisco Chronicle

    The characters in Tim Tharp's powerful first novel, FALLING DARK (Milkweed; 271 pages; $21.95), lead lives as harsh and vacant as the Oklahoma landscape they inhabit. With unflinching clarity, Tharp records the corrosive effects of dead-end jobs, relentlessly bad luck and petty betrayals.

    Donna Bless, the alcoholic mother of two boys, shuttles hazily between her cashier's job and dates that begin with a 12-pack of beer. Having lost their father to a random act of violence, Donna's sons, Wesley and Nelson, struggle to steady themselves against the tug of their mother's despair. As Donna drifts into the orbit of Roy Dale, a man alternately grandiose and explosive, the Bless family become dangerously implicated in the huge marijuana production conducted by Roy's boss, a former hippie named Sam Casey.

    Tharp, a native Oklahoman, knows the territory of his novel well, and he brings the unsentimental glare of Richard Avedon's "American West" to his character portraits. But Tharp's stark writing finds a surprising, hollow beauty that Avedon's snide photographs never did. Describing Donna, Tharp writes, Now the empty half of the bed beside her stretched out like a desert she never could force herself to cross into and the black shapes surrounding the chest of drawers, the closet door, the rocking chair and nightstand, gathered all without substance, like silhouettes cut from black paper.

    Tharp's empathy allows him to enter each of his characters' points of view with the same fluid accuracy. His assurance in moving between the anxious hopes of Nelson, a small fatherless boy, and the flickering decency of his anguished mother gives "Falling Dark" a harrowing presence.

    —John Perry

    
    
    

  • from New York Times

    Cash Crop

    It's not corn that's as high as an elephant's eye in Oklahoma these days. In Tim Tharp's first novel, "Falling Dark," harvest season in America's heartland means rounding up old friends and heading out into the fields with axes, machetes and scissors to bring in this year's marijuana crop. The marijuana hidden among the bloodweed is one of several incongruities in the book, some lovely, some forced. The farm's owner, Sam Casey, is no drug lord; in fact, he is mild-mannered, even-tempered and looking to get out of the pot business. A straight-arrow plainsman? Actually, he purchased the farm from the Sunshine People, a commune to which he once belonged, whose constitution consisted of a single word: "We." Then there is Sam's associate, Roy Dale, whose nice-guy name (think Roy Rogers and Dale Evans) belies a dark heart. When a beleaguered, alcoholic single mother is almost raped outside a bar, Roy pummels her attacker — but then gets her drunk and has sex with her himself. When we later learn Roy once wanted to run a farm for children, though, it's too much (and too late — he's too evil). Tharp's story tumbles out in a rush — he lets his dialogue run free without quotation marks, and his sentences become long streams of detail. The result is a fast-flowing, vivid tale of a new kind of prairie that is home to an old kind of conflict, good versus evil.

    —Liam Callanan