When The Fall Is All There Is

Ted Gray was the best thing ever to come out of Stockbridge, New Hampshire. A quarterback of surpassing skill and a student of limitless potential, Ted found his way to Yale and Columbia before slinking back home, victim of his own potential, of his own hubris.

WHEN THE FALL IS ALL THERE IS tells the tale of a young man of talent, of intellect, of destiny…and yet aware of the cost of all of these. Ted Gray conquered his small town and left to conquer the world. Except he learned, to his peril, that the world is not so readily conquered. The world fights back. And with Ted, it sent him back to Stockbridge, tail between his legs, a man-boy defeated, a prodigal son who failed to achieve the requisite heights. Back home, a failure in his own mind, he coaches football and teaches history and falls in love with Jill Ward, a woman with her own disappointments. Will Ted reclaim his lofty destiny? Or will he embrace something more human and ultimately more satisfying?

A novel of love and failure, WHEN THE FALL IS ALL THERE IS explores Ted’s efforts to understand his fall from grace, to come to terms with a lesser life, a smaller life, a life with value despite its smallness. Echoing Frank Deford’s Everybody’s All-American, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, and Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You, AFTER THE FALL summons the small-town New Hampshire ethos of John Irving and marries it to the narrative density of Sherwood Anderson or Thomas Hardy. This is a novel that celebrates and deconstructs place, that roots and tethers its characters, that seeks to transcend setting and fails.

WHEN THE FALL IS ALL THERE IS is a contemporary fiction novel by author Joe Pace, whose novel MOSS earned the 2023 Hawthorne Prize for Fiction and was recognized as the 2023 Fiction work of the year by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.