Synopsis
After a childhood darker than most, Rudyard Gillette has reached a standstill. A forty-year-old former college baseball player, Rud works for a textbook publishing company during the week, plays golf with his haunted yet gentle father on weekends, and sleeps with his girlfriend any day she'll let him - that is, when her other boyfriend isn't around.
But one afternoon Rud's routine is interrupted by a tragedy, and his tentative life spins apart. Devastated, tormented by a sense of failure, and utterly alone, Rud moves haltingly through each day until he meets Gale Harmon, the beautiful, enigmatic woman who was his childhood friend and first love. Just as Rud begins to find comfort in renewed friendship, Gale disappears. Rud's choice is clear, and he abandons everything - home, job, girlfriend - to search for her.
Reviews
Young Rud Gillette, the taciturn protagonist of this tentative first novel, has a tough time coming to terms with a number of familial stresses: his parents' divorce, his estrangement from his mother, his father's alcoholism and unsuccessful remarriage. As a boy growing up in Canada, Rud internalizes the otherness his peers see in him (he's of Indian descent yet speaks with an English accent). By the time his father commits suicide by disemboweling himself, Rud has grown up to be a gloomy textbook salesman. Not surprisingly, the trauma of his family life has so frozen his emotions that he can't truly fall in love with his longtime girlfriend. Rud begins to thaw, however, when he receives a disturbing message in his mail slot from Gale Harmon, his childhood sweetheart, who conveys that she is so tortured by her own tragic family history that she may try to take her own life. Determined to track her down, Rud journeys to Buddhist retreats across Canada and the U.S. Traveling beside him is the urn that contains his father's remains. Eventually, Rud finds Gale at a zendo in Montana where, supported and inspired by Zen teachings, he finally allows himself to think about his life and his past in a way that makes it possible for him to bury his father's ashes. Hester, who teaches literature and writing at the University of Montana, is an able writer who possesses a sturdy if unspectacular storytelling style. Occasionally, he lets fly with a jarringly British colloquialism (climbing a ladder, Rud "scooted like a steeplejack up the wonky rungs"). Steadily, he takes the reader on a knowing ride through the rough country of a young man's broken heart.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Original, quirky, impressive first fiction by a former Zen student, British-born, who now teaches at the University of Montana. Hester's greatest strength lies in his dialogue, given here without quote marks (as in Cormac McCarthy), and creating a kind of many-voiced stream-of-consciousness narrative. And the storytelling is equally unsettling, often jumping from scene to scene with dizzying speed. At the novel's core is the search by Rudyard Gillette, a distressed middle-aged man, for the now-vanished woman he once loved. His increasingly frantic journey takes him across the country, while Hester deftly sketches in Rud's life: his tragic, sports-addicted childhood, his turbulent adolescence, his athletic career in college. Rud's mother dies while he is still young; his alcoholic father, who's given to violent accidents, remarries; and Rud himself becomes locked in a perpetual rivalry with his stepbrother Troy, and in an equally peculiar relationship with Etta, his stepmother. Both Rud and Troy enter the world of academic publishing, Rud as a sales rep, Troy in management--with the publishing background, neatly rendered, having a grand cynical edge to it. Meantime, Gale Harmon, a childhood friend whom both had loved, has become a teacher at a Catholic school and written a study of literary suicides that attracts Rud, who wants Troy to publish it. But when Rud's father commits suicide in a particularly gory manner, and Gale's father follows suit, Gale flees, and Rud follows in pursuit, fearing that she may also take her own life. He knows only that she's taken refuge at a Zen retreat somewhere in the country, and so he drives to hundreds of such sites, finally finding her living with a fallen Zen master (a former baseball star when he was in Japan) in the Montana backwoods. The story plays itself out deliciously but has an unfortunately thin ending--all summary narration. Still, this is a highly idiosyncratic, audacious debut. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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