An Untold Tale - Hardcover

Strong, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0944072321 ISBN 13: 9780944072325

Publisher: Zoland Books, 1993

Synopsis

Sam Lara's family owned a mill, and Otis Gable's father was a handyman, and the two boys were the entire fifth grade in their village school. Sam, wild and rebellious, left home at eighteen to explore the world beyond, while Otis took up hammer and wrench and paintbrush like his father and never left his native valley.
Then in 1992, a world-weary Sam showed up in town again, silently accompanied by a handsome young Arab - servant or lover, no one could tell. He'd come back to claim his patrimony the vine-covered ruin of his grandfather's mill, and perhaps to heal a wound he'd inflicted thirty years before on his admiring classmate.
Jonathan Strong has created unforgettable antagonists: quiet, bookish, brooding Otis and charismatic Sam, the prodigal who brings home all the tumult of the outside world. Their love/hate relationship fires up a story, by turns poignant and electrifying, that envelopes the reader like a myth in the making.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Strong teaches at Tufts University.

Reviews

Primordial New England might well describe Strong's ( Elsewhere ) enjoyable, challenging third novel. It is an oozy, fecund tale of male, female, hetero and homosexual identity. Through his objective, yet intimately knowledgeable narrator, local handyman Otis Cable, Strong provides the reader with a vision of the decaying human and environmental ecosystem of Otis Pond, N.H., circa 1992. Strong's characterizations and descriptions are full-bodied and three dimensional, though his prose is occasionally wordy and self-indulgent. His vivid protagonist is the hamlet's passionate renegade, middle-aged Sam Lara, who finally comes home after an absence of many years, bringing with him someone whose sex the townspeople cannot quite determine: he/she is clearly from the Middle East, and may be a companion, servant or lover. Old passions and relationships are resurrected as Sam tries to reintegrate himself into his childhood community, and he serves as the lynchpin of an interlocking drama that crescendos abruptly with the novel's shocking but ambiguous close. Ultimately, Strong's exploration of the issues of love, sex and politics is long on ideas but short on dramatic tension.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A mysterious Prodigal Son returns to his New Hampshire village, but there's more mystification than mystery in Strong's slow, fussy fourth novel; it follows Companion Pieces, two novellas published earlier this year. Otis Pond was dominated for years by two mill-owning families, the Ottos and the Laras. But the last Lara, the skirt-chasing, hell-raising Sam, took off when he was 18, and the mill died with his grandfather. Now, 30 years later, Sam has returned from distant parts with an epicene Arab called Khaled in tow, and the village is buzzing with rumors. Could Sam have turned gay? Nobody is more curious than narrator Otis Cable. Otis is the village handyman and ``village memory,'' an intensely bookish fellow devoted to local history. He is also an out-of-the-closet homosexual with bittersweet memories of Sam, who once forced Otis to fellate him at knifepoint. Alas, Otis's curiosity will not be satisfied, for Strong doesn't have the faintest idea what to do with the uncommunicative Sam, other than to insist that his charisma is still intact. A confrontation with a local businessman, Ezzelino, who may have the goods on Sam, is nipped in the bud when Ezzelino vanishes. Foul play? That's what surviving mill-owner Fred Otto figures as he tries to drag Sam to court, but the wild man eludes him in a high-speed car chase that ends in Sam's death. Finally, we get a number of bizarre answers--though Khaled's tale remains, as the title promised, ``untold.'' There's an unbridgeable gap between plot and theme here. Strong never seems comfortable spinning suspense out of Sam's past and Ezzelino's disappearance; where he's happiest is in celebrating the life of a tradition-bound village endangered by a wave of well- heeled professionals fleeing the cities. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Written in poetic, deliberately ambiguous prose, this challenging but only fitfully rewarding novel requires its audience to fill in missing story threads by reading between the lines. Strong, who teaches creative writing at Tufts University, knows the taciturn New England personality and writes compellingly about the New Hampshire town of Otis Pond and its reticent inhabitants. A 30-year-old exchange of hard words between central characters Sam Lara and Otis Cable continues to fester in a story that also addresses communal attitudes toward homosexuality. Forcing readers to acknowledge unanswered questions and unsolved problems, Strong ( Secret Words , LJ 3/15/92) has created an enigmatic work more notable for its style than its substance. For comprehensive fiction collections.
- Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zoland Books
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0944072321
• ISBN 13: 9780944072325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228