The Past Leads a Life of Its Own

A series of interlinked vignettes shows how a child sees beyond innocence and security when his young friend dies, his father looks for work, and he must deal with a tyrannical schoolmaster

Growing up in an Illinois town and, later, in a Des Moines, Iowa, housing project, Lonnie is an expert on the anguish of adults. His parents are members of the permanently semi-employed working class, hopping from city to farm in search of construction work or vegetables to pick. Set against the rhythms of nature, Field's 16 luminous, interrelated stories celebrate a boy's coming-of-age in America's hard-luck heartland. Fields ( What the River Knows ) creates believable characters who struggle to maintain their self-respect and dignity amid the debris of their lives. The uncluttered, simple plots concern a sadistic, religion-obsessed teacher who gets his comeuppance from Lonnie's father; an aunt's wedding plans gone hilariously haywire; an uncle's tractor accident that gives Lonnie his first glimpse of the inside of a hospital; a farmer who cheats him out of a day's pay; an unemployed man deserted by his wife and by the death of their two-year-old daughter. The beauty of these deeply felt stories lies in their spare, ear-perfect language and in quiet epiphanies.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fields (What the River Knows, 1990) now turns to fiction to write about the vanishing world of rural Middle America in a correspondingly old-fashioned way: In these linked stories, manhood has nothing to do with sexuality, everything to do with facing up to work, responsibility, and death. Once past the pretentious Introduction (about memory and narrative), the banal Prologue (in which boy, father, and grandfather look up at the wild geese), and the melodrama of the first story (which takes the central character, Lonnie, abruptly from childhood to his future as an unemployed man grieving for absent wife and dead child), Fields begins to express a moving vision of decent people who never seem to get the rewards of their integrity and their labor. Young Lonnie--who grows up near construction-job sites when his father is employed and on his grandparents' farm when he is not--``conceived of work less as a thing man was condemned to do than a thing man was condemned to seek.'' Lonnie glories in the natural world and profits from the wisdom of elders--the stubborn (if unorthodox) faith and communal support that keep people going--even as he observes a world full of disappointments and deaths (a man cuts off his own head with a chain saw; a long-lost relative returns home only for burial, etc.). Mixing pain and uplift, Fields's plain-spoken moral messages seem appropriate to the time and place and sneak handily past the barriers of contemporary cynicism. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this beautifully subtle work, Fields remembers a patchwork of stories through Lonnie, who is raised on his mother's family's farm between the moves his father makes in order to find work in post-World War II America. Here are a series of vignettes, each capturing some moment in nature, poetic and ethereal, followed by a narrative where Lonnie makes one careful step after another into adulthood. As he grows, the reader comes to know members of his family through Lonnie's eyes. His father, always in search of elusive unskilled labor, still maintains a relationship with his son. His proud mother follows the man in his efforts to sidestep poverty, while Lonnie's great uncle, a preacher by trade, speaks with God's voice. These narratives are like stones skipping on water, capturing the struggles of a family leaving one way of life behind for another. Fields remembers the feeling of a time and a place gone forever. Recommended for public libraries.
-Brack Stovall, Carrollton P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.