The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 January 2014
by Sam Patterson
Childhood has always been treacherous. In recent years, it seems we have become much more sensitive to the perceived threats against children than we were in past years. How often do you hear someone say, Back in my day, my parents let us get away with all kinds of stuff? Given the historic low rates of violent crime we actually enjoy these days, the hyper-protectiveness we see might not be based in reality as much as perception, an impression spread by the ubiquity of bad news broadcasting. Anyway, our point is that childhood is not necessarily any more dangerous today than it was a century ago, and is, in many ways, far safer. In any case, much of the danger we think of as particularly modern was already present decades ago.
Thus, this novel opens with a memorably disturbing encounter between a thirteen-year-old boy and the minister who has just publicly baptized him. Given the attention to clerical sexual misconduct today, it is notable that this book was first published in 1966 and its author writes of a fictional childhood in 1936. Our protagonist is Carey, second youngest of five children in a family living in a rural town in the South. He is a pretty normal thirteen year-old kid, trying to make sense of a world populated by people who each have their own history, quirks and damages. The book is heavily populated by low-key characters with bits of secrets and demands they make on those around them. It is a long hot eventful summer, beginning with the baptism and ending with fire. Carey's older brother Blake has left home under mysterious circumstances, but Carey idolizes his memory and hopes to one day join him. His older sister Margaret is pregnant and his mother is so deeply protective of the boy that he doesn't even know a baby is on the way. Less well-drawn are the other siblings, bitter Claude and the youngest girl. There are neighbors, young friends, aunts, uncles and cousins. We get to know the women in the story a bit more than the men, and perhaps that is natural for kids at home while fathers go off to work in mills and on railroads. Carey gets sent away when Blake's story reaches a crisis point and the parents head to California to see him. And away, the events don't slow down, in a small mill town with one aunt and another, not to mention a troubled cousin and a noisy cotton farm. The book is richly populated, full of landscape and homesteads. The boy is unlike the precocious kids we see in so many novels. He is a normal kid for whom much of the world is a complete mystery. Much of that mystery has to do with his burgeoning sexuality, and his growing perception of the sexuality of the people around him. Patterson displays here a gift for conveying the boy's circumscribed life, while exposing him to all kinds of domestic hazards, and some disturbing secrets. There's a lot here that could have easily filled out a much longer book. Though it is long out of print, this reader considers the book well worth the search in some well-appointed library or on-line used bookseller.
See also: [The Iron Country by Mary Patterson]