Smith Henderson has blown up.
Not literally of course, but his debut novel Fourth of July Creek received much critical praise and favorable comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford and Daniel Woodrell. Esteemed company to be sure, and combining those authors would create a hell of a novel.
Without a doubt, Fourth of July Creek is a hell of a novel, despite a few frustrating flaws.
This story captures rural Montana in 1980. Pete Snow lives and works as a social worker for the Department of Family Services. His job consists of visiting terrible family situations, attempting to help and going home without a “thank you” or a “good job.”
Henderson describes his work this way:
Plates crusted with dried mustard and mayo and ketchup crowded the countertops like discarded palettes. Fruit flies teemed over a bowl of old fruit, fruit he might’ve brought two weeks ago. Jesus it was the fruit he’d brought. For fucksake. You try and help and she doesn’t even give them the fruit. She doesn’t even pretend. You put the fruit in the bowl for her and you say to her to make the kids eat it and she nods vigorously like she learned to in school, in detention, at what few jobs she’s had, she’s only ever learned to nod and say yes. Fucksake.
Pete has recently separated from his wife, who has custody of his daughter Rachel (or Rose as she prefers to be called). He must navigate a life that continues to fill to the brim with loss, including a law-breaking brother who skips town, a dying father and a girlfriend with a troubled past.
Enter Jeremiah Pearl, a cripplingly paranoid conspiracy theorist, and his Kasper Hauser-esque son, Benjamin. These new arrivals capture the attention of Pete, who attempts to provide aid to Jeremiah, a man convinced the end times are near.
Pete remains the main focus of the novel, but Rose receives a good amount of attention in a series of third-person interviews. These sections can break your heart, as we learn of Pete’s failings as a father and his daughter’s urges for independence and freedom. Rose feels pushed to run away from her family and the known world. Her story quickly becomes the more compelling of the two.
No matter the plot line, Henderson’s fluid sentences allow a reader to easily slide through a hundred pages in a sitting. The descriptions stay clear and never feel rushed. All the information the author offers seems necessary.
That’s the secret sauce, the reason this ambitious debut novel has enjoyed success. Henderson never releases a reader. All the varying threads he creates and all the characters and relationships he describes snare us. Pete begins to spiral out of control, we listen to his daughter’s sacrifices and we care for so many broken people … who never get a break.
As Henderson unspools this tale, tears seem commonplace—tears shed by the characters and those that slide down a reader’s nose and drip onto the page. Henderson creates that emotional weight. He makes these moments matter.
This novel’s impressive power does not mean perfection. There exists a fierce problem: its narrator.
This reader found it an increasing challenge to battle the overly opinionated, misogynistic, third-person narration. Granted, the most interesting characters here are the women. The lamentations of the narrator, however, force a focus on the less-fascinating Pete. This book’s omniscient God really wants us to like Pete, though our protagonist either sleeps with or dismisses all the women in his life.
We continually read how hard Pete tries, how hard he tried. How he can’t give up on finding Rose. How he can’t stop himself from helping the scarred young souls growing lost inside the children of a 1980s Montana nightmare.
But Pete’s actions never match up to the narrator’s representation. An objective assessment of Pete’s characteristics out him as the man he really is: an alcoholic. A terrible social worker. A chauvinistic, self-destructive man-child who gives up trying to find his daughter relatively quickly. A man unable to forgive.
These qualities make good reading in most cases. Here, it tests all credibility to be told throughout the novel that Pete was right, forgiven and likeable no matter the terrible choices he makes.
For a book with such forceful command and potent intention, the ending misses the mark, too. We leave Pete more or less where he started, unchanged by a 500-page ride through Henderson’s tale. Pete plods along rock bottom, but rock bottom appears to mean nothing. Rose’s compelling end, based on choices she bravely makes, feels like the honest one in this book.
Phil McCausland writes for the New Orleans Advocate and manages Lentmag.com. His writing has appeared in Paste and the Oxford American.