Falling Dark

In a novel set in small-town Oklahoma, a former 1960s commune turned marijuana farm draws a cast of fallen dreamers to its strange bosom. Tour.

Set in the early '70s in a rural Oklahoma town, Tharp's first novel attempts to capture the gritty backlash against '60s hippie idealism. Sam Casey's farm was founded as a Walden-inspired commune, complete with geodesic dome, but has deteriorated into a small-time marijuana operation. Donna Bless, the mother of two teenage sons, Nelson and Wesley, has crumbled into alcoholism (and men's beds) since her husband was murdered by marauding teens, a night that sensitive young Nelson painfully remembers. With a dirty mouth and an opportunistic streak, chronic troublemaker Roy Dale brings these two worlds into head-on collision, seducing Donna with a six-pack in the back of his truck and putting her boys to work selling some of Sam's crop. Teenage love, small-town blues and neighborhood bullies flourish amid the strip joints, honky-tonks, gas stations and the Git-n-Go convenience store. Trapped in their weaknesses, steeped in marijuana-haze and rum-and-coke stupors, Tharp's characters seem primed to convey philosophical reflections on self-destruction and recovery, but when he pushes the story into a brawling face-off and comes up with a picturesque ending, the characters' scrappy charm fades. Tharp's prose style, too, may be problematical for the reader. Searching for novelty in syntactical unconventionality, he blends dialogue with third-person narration and deliberately blurs the line between a character's speech and internal thoughts. Though the device adequately weaves together the characters' actions and motives, it often seems an affectation. This novel about diminished expectations commands full attention, however, when it leaps into a kind of transcendent faith. When young Nelson defies racist bullies who malign one of his friends, the scene is all the more poignant for its hardscrabble setting. (Oct.) FYI: Tharp's novel is the winner of the 1999 Milkweed Fiction Prize.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A rambling but interesting debut (winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize) about a troubled family that comes under the influence of a drifter and his drug-dealing boss. Single mothers cant ever expect to have an easy time of it, but single mothers who drink too much have to be prepared for the worst. Donna Bless tries hard to do right by her boys Nelson and Wesley, but shes basically a party girl at heart and cant resist an evening (maybe even a whole night) at a local honky-tonk whenever the opportunity presents itself. One of her partners in crime is a strange, charismatic barfly named Roy Dale, who steps in one evening when a local cowboy comes on too strong after the third beer and wont take no for an answer. Roy flattens the sap with a single punch, then offers Maggie a chaser. The result: she falls for him head over heels. Roy offers Wesley a job working on his friend Sam Caseys farm, good money for outdoor work in the boys spare time. The Casey spread was at one time a full-fledged commune and is still pretty weird to this day. Nothing much grows there but marijuana, though theres enough of that to keep everyone busy and ensure that Sam stays in the black. Sam himself is a decent sort, somewhat addled but humane. Roy, however, turns out to be a good deal less benign than he first appeared. For one thing, hes a thoroughgoing lush, and hes quickly becoming a kind of surrogate father to the boys. Maggie worries about his influence on them, but she herself has become so entwined in his world of drink and drugs that she doesnt know how to get out. Can will power and mothers love overcome ordinary human weakness? Even when its overlaid with addiction? Badly organized and far too loose, but Tharps debut has a poignancy and grace that gets it over the bumps on its way: Worth a look. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.