Enduring

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Enduring Pub. Date: 9/28/2009 Publisher: Harington, Donald

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"Forty years ago, Donald Harington created the little town of Stay More, hidden away in the hills of the Ozarks. He populated it with generations of families who had escaped the Appalachians in search of something - more room, greener pastures, freedom from convention, sweeter air and water, or simply a world where time and history don't matter. The first person the author created to inhabit his town was a woman, Latha Bourne, who would be the heroine and demigoddess of Lightning Bug and would reappear in numerous novels, herself serving as narrator of the classic The Chairing of the Trees." "From the beginning, she was set apart from the others by her beauty, her wit, her mystery, and her intense if unfulfilled sexuality. She was an enigma to her fellow Stay Morons, as Harington chose to call his citizenry, not insultingly but affectionately, in a play upon the town's invitational name and in recognition of the dictionary's definition of a "moron" as someone forever locked into the ages from 7 to 12, the years of most surprise and wonder and delight." But until this novel, Enduring, we never learned what happened to Latha herself between those ages, or, for that matter, at many other stages of her mysterious life. Now, in his largest novel yet, Harington reveals her entire story from beginning to ... end?

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Harington's Stay More saga of novels, 40 years on, comes to a close-perhaps. It's an Arkansas version of the Tale of Genji, an Ozarkian Odyssey: At any rate, many volumes of many hundreds of pages each add up to one of the most ambitious fictional cycles in American literature. Harington (Farther Along, 2008, etc.) builds the tale of a character who has figured, sometimes peripherally, throughout. Latha Bourne is smart, sensitive and out of place in the backwoods village of Stay More, populated by those whom Harington long ago branded "Staymorons." (An Arkansan, he can get away with it.) Told many years later from a descendant's point of view, Latha's story is not a happy one; she is molested and maltreated in a chaotic time, when war is making strangers of men being pulled off for the trenches of France. For various reasons she spends time under psychiatric care, a staple of Ingledew family lore thereafter. A new mother-complexities abound there-she finds herself on the road, meeting the people one meets there, drifters and veterans "looking for the right place," and traveling full circle "on stretches of primitive road that wandered and meandered and forked," lost in a countryside that even natives find difficult to traverse. Latha makes her way home in time, settling among disapproving townies while cajoling her husband-to-be to share her bed (a one-time preacher, he still "didn't want to sleep with Latha until they were married") and otherwise scandalizing the locals. Life moves on, and Harington's tale swallows up whole decades. His affect is sometimes faux-naif, but underlying this tale are moments of apparent homage to Faulkner's Light in August (and perhaps even Sanctuary);throughout, he writes elegantly of a time gone by, and of people whom, in real life, time would have forgotten. Elegiac and complex-a feast of Southerly words that will please Harington's many admirers.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781592642564
Publisher: Harington, Donald
Publication date: 9/28/2009
Pages: 500
Series: Stay More Series
Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.60 (h) x 1.60 (d)

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D-Chaudoir

Posted September 29, 2009

A beautiful, enduring novel

Welcome to Stay More, Arkansas and the magical world of Latha Bourne, one of the most singularly interesting characters in all of American fiction. This beautiful, expansive novel is one of the most engrossing and fascinating works I have ever read. It follows the life of Latha Bourne, her entire life so far, from cradle to the age of something past 100.

Like all of Harington's books, there is no need to read them in any kind of order or sequence as Mr. Harington writes as a storyteller first, and he does it so artfully that every novel exists as its own creation--I myself have read his novels in different orders and have been rewarded in my own experience. There is no earthly way a reader will get lost in this book, other than in its enchantment and delicious plot. In fact this book itself may be a good place to start if it's your first Harington novel. If you read it you'll see why.

Latha Bourne is one of the most beautiful heroines in all of literature, and she is also one of the most independent and enduring. I loved learning about her family, her troubles, her "exile" and sojourn, and triumphant return to Stay More. Along the way, we meet and admire, perhaps fall in love with, a large cast of major and minor players (Every Dill, Doc Swain, the Duckworths, the Whitters, Dawny, Dan, Sharon, Larry, the Ingledews and Chisms and a few other surprises), all of whom--almost by magic--leave an indelible mark on the mind of the reader, the only place where in fact they exist. The settings vary from Stay More, Jasper, Little Rock, and Tennessee. I can't give away much more because I risk spoiling so many beautiful surprises that are best encountered in your reading.

The book is told as a wonderful story, as if around a campfire or an old fashioned gathering, and I couldn't help myself but want to visit this place sometime, to see if I could sit with Latha on her front porch, or near the dogtrot, and have a glass of lemonade and learn about the history of her mythical, inviting, beckoning hamlet.

Mr. Harington is well-known for his playful wordplay and musical language, and his impeccable comedic timing--all of which are present here. But he is not usually given his due as the master of suspense and plot he is... ENDURING is a testament to those talents. I turned the final page with a great deal of satisfaction and also without a clue where the hours went, the hours I spent happily traveling through Latha Bourne's remarkable life.

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Enduring

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A beautiful, enduring novel