Northwest Corner: A Novel - Hardcover
The New York Times Book Review called Reservation Road “a triumph,” and the novel was universally acclaimed. Now, in a brilliant literary performance by one of our most compelling and compassionate writers, John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road’s unforgettable characters in a superb new work of fiction that stands magnificently on its own. Northwest Corner is a riveting story about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges.
Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he’s hidden.
Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam’s sense of guilt is as crushing as his father’s. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.
Told in the resonant voices of everyday people gripped in the emotional riptide of lived life, Northwest Corner is at once tough and heart-lifting, an urgent, powerful story about family bonds that can never be broken and the wayward roads that lead us back to those we love.
Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he’s hidden.
Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam’s sense of guilt is as crushing as his father’s. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.
Told in the resonant voices of everyday people gripped in the emotional riptide of lived life, Northwest Corner is at once tough and heart-lifting, an urgent, powerful story about family bonds that can never be broken and the wayward roads that lead us back to those we love.
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About the Author:
John Burnham Schwartz is the author of four previous novels: The Commoner, Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days, and Reservation Road, which was made into a motion picture based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into two dozen languages, and his writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. A winner of the Lyndhurst Foundation Award for mastery in the art of fiction, Schwartz has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently literary director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son, Garrick.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
SAM
“Arno—bus.”
Coach dips out of the locker room. Sam listens to the footsteps echoing down the long corridor and only now, knowing he’s the last, removes the towel draped over his head. He picks up the thirty-one ounce aluminum bat lying by his feet, jams it into the UConn duffel with the rest of his gear, and zips the bag closed.
The bus is already running when he climbs on. The row in front belongs to him now. The doors fold in with a sigh, and Old Hank shifts into gear for the three-hour trip back to Storrs.
Evening is falling. Sam slides his headphones on and tries to become just another shadow.
Into the athletic-center parking lot the bus doors open: high fluorescent lights, pools of blue night. A gangplank waiting, all lit up. He’s sitting right behind Hank and should go first, but it feels less bad to stay where he is, headphones on, eyes nowhere, deep in the stump of his own mortification. Teammates start to shuffle by, smells of glove leather and greased eye black, hail-like rapping of spikes.
A hand on his arm. It’s Jake, his roommate. Sam lifts one side of the headphones an inch.
“Heading back to the room?”
Jake’s voice is almost insultingly tender. The comfort you receive when, bases loaded and two out in the tenth inning of the college playoffs, you strike out without taking a swing, ending your team’s season.
“Shower up, at least. You look like shit.”
Sam shakes his head gratefully. The bat never even left his shoulder.
“Okay . . . see you later.” “See you.”
Then the bus is empty, except for himself and Hank.
“This ain’t your goddamn limo, y’know.” Hank’s voice a gravel bed, snowy buzz cut and jowly neck turned round on him from the driver’s perch. The dash clock reads 10:20. Out of respect, Sam pulls off the phones. A sigh from Hank as he levers the doors closed. “So, fuck it. Where to, DiMaggio?”
Where to is O’Doul’s, off-campus, third-choice watering hole in town, nobody’s date-night destination. The school bus pulls up outside. Neon fizzing through the windows, fun-housing the gloom.
He tells Hank to hold on, takes off his game jersey, and buries it in the duffel. He wishes the bag didn’t say UConn in big white letters—it’s not that kind of bar—but there’s nothing to be done about it now. He’s already down to the two-tone undershirt with the sleeves hacked off below the elbow and the dirt-stained away-game pants worn low, no stirrups, and the spikes that make each step sound like he’s chucking bags of marbles.
“You’re a million bucks,” Hank growls. “Go get ’em, tiger.” “Thanks for the ride, Hank.”
“We all got bad days, Sammy.”
“Yeah.” Suddenly, he’s blinking back tears. “Stay out of trouble, now.”
The bus doors start to close before his foot touches the curb. By the time he passes through the entrance to the bar, Hank and his caravan are gone.
· · ·
O’Doul’s is hot and crowded, the walls painted dark. A long time, Sam stands drinking by himself. When a stool at the bar finally opens, he slides onto it, the UConn duffel shoved down into the sawdust-and-gum shadows at his feet. A Bacardi mirror with fogged glass hangs above the backbar next to a St. Pauli Girl clock, the clock’s hands frozen at twelve minutes to six, permanent happy hour.
“ ’Nother?”
The bartender, wiping under his empty bottle. “With a shot of J.D. this time.”
“Right up.”
He keeps forgetting. Trying to get back to just before—on-deck circle, pure ritual, mechanical drop of vinyl-covered doughnut over aluminum barrel, stretching the bat down his back and around, beginning to swing nice and loose. Watching the pitcher and timing the swing. Watching and timing till it’s second nature.
No such thing, he needs to tell Coach. Just the nature you’re born
with, handed down through the generations.
He was thinking too much, even in the on-deck circle, before the first pitch was thrown. He can see it now that it’s too late. Not empty as he should’ve been, cleared out; too much junk in his attic. Thinking about what he’d do if the big chance came, what a game-winning hit would feel like. At the plate Stemkowski’s just taken ball three and Coach is in the dugout barking, “Good eye, Stem. Good eye, buddy!” The crowd (attendance announced at 683), roaring their heads off, as Stem watches ball four ride in tight under his neck and starts jogging up the first-base line, loading the bases. And Sam stakes the bat handle into the packed dirt, dislodging the doughnut, the weight slips off and the bat becomes a killing staff. And for about half a minute a raw brute strength he’s never personally experienced before comes surging through his shoulders down to his hands, and he strides into the batter’s box believing for once that it’s going to happen. The strength fills him, blotting out the past; till it takes him too
far, tips the meter into the red; and because it’s raw and threatening and not really there, this illusion of power, already leaving, leads him to his father. It makes him think of his father. At which moment, the first pitch on its way, he knows in his sinking heart how it’s all going to play out.
DWIGHT
At 11:47 a.m., a man in a patterned vacation shirt not unlike mine
steps out of his Lexus SUV, followed by his young son. I watch them through the front window from aisle seven (baseball, softball, more baseball) in a moment of commercial respite and quicksand reminiscence, a Rawlings infielder’s glove cupped over my nose, its hefty price tag flapping, inhaling the bicameral whiff of factory-fresh leather. Trying, as ever, to situate myself in actual time and space. Call it a voluntary hijacking: I’m no longer in SoCal Sports in Arenas, California, in the year 2006, but in Pat’s Team Outfitters in North Haven, Connecticut, circa 1966. Not fifty years old but ten. Staring up into my old man’s wide creased face. Absorbing that shark-skinned voice as he tells me he’ll buy me the glove I want, so long as I swear on my life to treat it right. But if he ever finds it food-stained or left out overnight on the lawn, abused in any way, he’ll thrash me with it, that’s a solid promise, and my playing days will be done. Do I understand? Already this dark shadow he’s casting over me and the thing I’ve always wanted. Which dooms me somehow, the little poisoned apple he’s offering. And still I crave the glove so much I’m going to give him the price he demands.
And then, before my first season of Little League is halfway over, early one morning he finds the Rawlings, that holy object of calfskin perfection, on our shitty, dew-soaked lawn. Just as he foresaw. I’m still in bed asleep, fielding grounders in my dreams, when he bursts into my room and beats me with it good.
Listen to me. These are the sorts of thoughts that too often come back while you’re spending thirty months in the hole. And after, too.
There’s violence in the air, even when nothing is happening. The idea of personal control is just a noble pipe dream. What comes at you feels bitterly, in the end, like some echo of what’s inside you. Like any vessel only more so, a place gets defined by what’s in it. A hive hums and buzzes. A fist is nothing without rage.
The glass doors open: in come the man and his boy. I pull the glove from my face and replace it on the shelf. Dust myself off, as it were. The boy trailing off his dad’s hip at four o’clock, but looking up into that trusted face and smiling. The guy turning back over his shoulder—a joke just passing between them, or a story, say, about soggy doughnuts, wafting in from the parking lot like a cool breeze in summer. Their outward physical details less interesting to me by comparison, though still notable: the dad’s big expensive watch, like a hunk of gold bullion clamped to his wrist, the boy’s pro-model Dodgers cap and special-edition Tony Hawk slide-ons. Upper-middleclass family, I’d say. He a rising associate in one of the investment boutiques in the recently developed Arenas business park or a tax lawyer taking a much-deserved post–April 15th day off; his boy, at ten or eleven a promising private-school student with an easy, winning personality, though perhaps too enamored of skate culture and the slackers down by the piers and so already being prophylactically primed by his parents for a future boarding spot at the exclusive Thacher School. Lacrosse, I decide, this kid’s going to learn lacrosse, as the father checks their progress at the front of the store, the better to assess the aisles of merchandise and the somewhat dubious prospects for service. He spots Derek stacking boxed volleyballs in aisle three. But a first lacrosse stick is serious business, and possibly Derek, who takes night classes in diagnostic massage at UCSB and is today wearing a purple sun visor backward, doesn’t look quite up to the task. So the man’s gaze turns ninety degrees—passing over Sandra, my boss’s fetching twenty-year-old niece, at the register—to land on me in aisle seven. I suppose that, ignorant of my résumé, he mistakenly considers me the safe bet for attentive shopping assistance in the store. And who can blame him? I am fifty years old, rel-
atively fit yet comfortably substantial. My red plastic SoCal Sports tag says dwight arno, manager in clear white letters. Under expected circumstances I would be a figure of rectitude and probity.
To wh...
“Arno—bus.”
Coach dips out of the locker room. Sam listens to the footsteps echoing down the long corridor and only now, knowing he’s the last, removes the towel draped over his head. He picks up the thirty-one ounce aluminum bat lying by his feet, jams it into the UConn duffel with the rest of his gear, and zips the bag closed.
The bus is already running when he climbs on. The row in front belongs to him now. The doors fold in with a sigh, and Old Hank shifts into gear for the three-hour trip back to Storrs.
Evening is falling. Sam slides his headphones on and tries to become just another shadow.
Into the athletic-center parking lot the bus doors open: high fluorescent lights, pools of blue night. A gangplank waiting, all lit up. He’s sitting right behind Hank and should go first, but it feels less bad to stay where he is, headphones on, eyes nowhere, deep in the stump of his own mortification. Teammates start to shuffle by, smells of glove leather and greased eye black, hail-like rapping of spikes.
A hand on his arm. It’s Jake, his roommate. Sam lifts one side of the headphones an inch.
“Heading back to the room?”
Jake’s voice is almost insultingly tender. The comfort you receive when, bases loaded and two out in the tenth inning of the college playoffs, you strike out without taking a swing, ending your team’s season.
“Shower up, at least. You look like shit.”
Sam shakes his head gratefully. The bat never even left his shoulder.
“Okay . . . see you later.” “See you.”
Then the bus is empty, except for himself and Hank.
“This ain’t your goddamn limo, y’know.” Hank’s voice a gravel bed, snowy buzz cut and jowly neck turned round on him from the driver’s perch. The dash clock reads 10:20. Out of respect, Sam pulls off the phones. A sigh from Hank as he levers the doors closed. “So, fuck it. Where to, DiMaggio?”
Where to is O’Doul’s, off-campus, third-choice watering hole in town, nobody’s date-night destination. The school bus pulls up outside. Neon fizzing through the windows, fun-housing the gloom.
He tells Hank to hold on, takes off his game jersey, and buries it in the duffel. He wishes the bag didn’t say UConn in big white letters—it’s not that kind of bar—but there’s nothing to be done about it now. He’s already down to the two-tone undershirt with the sleeves hacked off below the elbow and the dirt-stained away-game pants worn low, no stirrups, and the spikes that make each step sound like he’s chucking bags of marbles.
“You’re a million bucks,” Hank growls. “Go get ’em, tiger.” “Thanks for the ride, Hank.”
“We all got bad days, Sammy.”
“Yeah.” Suddenly, he’s blinking back tears. “Stay out of trouble, now.”
The bus doors start to close before his foot touches the curb. By the time he passes through the entrance to the bar, Hank and his caravan are gone.
· · ·
O’Doul’s is hot and crowded, the walls painted dark. A long time, Sam stands drinking by himself. When a stool at the bar finally opens, he slides onto it, the UConn duffel shoved down into the sawdust-and-gum shadows at his feet. A Bacardi mirror with fogged glass hangs above the backbar next to a St. Pauli Girl clock, the clock’s hands frozen at twelve minutes to six, permanent happy hour.
“ ’Nother?”
The bartender, wiping under his empty bottle. “With a shot of J.D. this time.”
“Right up.”
He keeps forgetting. Trying to get back to just before—on-deck circle, pure ritual, mechanical drop of vinyl-covered doughnut over aluminum barrel, stretching the bat down his back and around, beginning to swing nice and loose. Watching the pitcher and timing the swing. Watching and timing till it’s second nature.
No such thing, he needs to tell Coach. Just the nature you’re born
with, handed down through the generations.
He was thinking too much, even in the on-deck circle, before the first pitch was thrown. He can see it now that it’s too late. Not empty as he should’ve been, cleared out; too much junk in his attic. Thinking about what he’d do if the big chance came, what a game-winning hit would feel like. At the plate Stemkowski’s just taken ball three and Coach is in the dugout barking, “Good eye, Stem. Good eye, buddy!” The crowd (attendance announced at 683), roaring their heads off, as Stem watches ball four ride in tight under his neck and starts jogging up the first-base line, loading the bases. And Sam stakes the bat handle into the packed dirt, dislodging the doughnut, the weight slips off and the bat becomes a killing staff. And for about half a minute a raw brute strength he’s never personally experienced before comes surging through his shoulders down to his hands, and he strides into the batter’s box believing for once that it’s going to happen. The strength fills him, blotting out the past; till it takes him too
far, tips the meter into the red; and because it’s raw and threatening and not really there, this illusion of power, already leaving, leads him to his father. It makes him think of his father. At which moment, the first pitch on its way, he knows in his sinking heart how it’s all going to play out.
DWIGHT
At 11:47 a.m., a man in a patterned vacation shirt not unlike mine
steps out of his Lexus SUV, followed by his young son. I watch them through the front window from aisle seven (baseball, softball, more baseball) in a moment of commercial respite and quicksand reminiscence, a Rawlings infielder’s glove cupped over my nose, its hefty price tag flapping, inhaling the bicameral whiff of factory-fresh leather. Trying, as ever, to situate myself in actual time and space. Call it a voluntary hijacking: I’m no longer in SoCal Sports in Arenas, California, in the year 2006, but in Pat’s Team Outfitters in North Haven, Connecticut, circa 1966. Not fifty years old but ten. Staring up into my old man’s wide creased face. Absorbing that shark-skinned voice as he tells me he’ll buy me the glove I want, so long as I swear on my life to treat it right. But if he ever finds it food-stained or left out overnight on the lawn, abused in any way, he’ll thrash me with it, that’s a solid promise, and my playing days will be done. Do I understand? Already this dark shadow he’s casting over me and the thing I’ve always wanted. Which dooms me somehow, the little poisoned apple he’s offering. And still I crave the glove so much I’m going to give him the price he demands.
And then, before my first season of Little League is halfway over, early one morning he finds the Rawlings, that holy object of calfskin perfection, on our shitty, dew-soaked lawn. Just as he foresaw. I’m still in bed asleep, fielding grounders in my dreams, when he bursts into my room and beats me with it good.
Listen to me. These are the sorts of thoughts that too often come back while you’re spending thirty months in the hole. And after, too.
There’s violence in the air, even when nothing is happening. The idea of personal control is just a noble pipe dream. What comes at you feels bitterly, in the end, like some echo of what’s inside you. Like any vessel only more so, a place gets defined by what’s in it. A hive hums and buzzes. A fist is nothing without rage.
The glass doors open: in come the man and his boy. I pull the glove from my face and replace it on the shelf. Dust myself off, as it were. The boy trailing off his dad’s hip at four o’clock, but looking up into that trusted face and smiling. The guy turning back over his shoulder—a joke just passing between them, or a story, say, about soggy doughnuts, wafting in from the parking lot like a cool breeze in summer. Their outward physical details less interesting to me by comparison, though still notable: the dad’s big expensive watch, like a hunk of gold bullion clamped to his wrist, the boy’s pro-model Dodgers cap and special-edition Tony Hawk slide-ons. Upper-middleclass family, I’d say. He a rising associate in one of the investment boutiques in the recently developed Arenas business park or a tax lawyer taking a much-deserved post–April 15th day off; his boy, at ten or eleven a promising private-school student with an easy, winning personality, though perhaps too enamored of skate culture and the slackers down by the piers and so already being prophylactically primed by his parents for a future boarding spot at the exclusive Thacher School. Lacrosse, I decide, this kid’s going to learn lacrosse, as the father checks their progress at the front of the store, the better to assess the aisles of merchandise and the somewhat dubious prospects for service. He spots Derek stacking boxed volleyballs in aisle three. But a first lacrosse stick is serious business, and possibly Derek, who takes night classes in diagnostic massage at UCSB and is today wearing a purple sun visor backward, doesn’t look quite up to the task. So the man’s gaze turns ninety degrees—passing over Sandra, my boss’s fetching twenty-year-old niece, at the register—to land on me in aisle seven. I suppose that, ignorant of my résumé, he mistakenly considers me the safe bet for attentive shopping assistance in the store. And who can blame him? I am fifty years old, rel-
atively fit yet comfortably substantial. My red plastic SoCal Sports tag says dwight arno, manager in clear white letters. Under expected circumstances I would be a figure of rectitude and probity.
To wh...
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- PublisherRandom House
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1400068452
- ISBN 13 9781400068456
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
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