Farther Along

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Farther Along Pub. Date: 2/1/2009 Publisher: Harington, Donald
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Farther Along Pub. Date: 5/1/2008 Publisher: Harington, Donald

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Overview

He wants to get away from it all. Despite a satisfying career as chief curator of a museum devoted to the vanished American past, he finds he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life and culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff-dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark mountains, with only a dog for company and only an atlatl - a primitive spear thrower - to provide him with his supper. His few amusements are the playing of tunes on a hair-comb-and-tissue and writing what he intends to be an indictment of modern civilization in his journals. He makes the acquaintance of a young moonshiner who keeps him supplied abundantly with corn liquor. But after six years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Escaping a devastating divorce by returning, in the 1970s, to his backwoods Ozarks roots, a successful, unnamed curator of American antiquities intends to drink himself to death. "The Bluff-dweller," who narrates the first third of this quietly ambitious novel from veteran Harington (The Pitcher Shower, etc.), has installed himself in a cave near an abandoned village that retains a single resident, and old woman. She narrates the book's middle; her grandson, a millionaire pork packer, owns the town and most of the land around it-except the part that's a national park, overseen by a forest ranger, who suffers the Bluff-dweller's presence. Other characters include a moonshiner, and a historian, Eliza Cunningham, whose letters to a woman named Linda comprise the book's final third. The plot, such as it is, involves whether the village should be restored, and whether the old woman will be able to bring the Bluff-dweller and Eliza together. Despite unreliable narrators and heavy conceits, there's no sense of self-indulgence or self-consciousness to the seductive prose, which is laced throughout with wit and clever allusion. The result is a pleasing if perplexing read, with lots of observation but no real movement. (May)

Library Journal

In this latest installment of his "Stay More" saga, Harington offers meditations on wisdom, love, death, sex, and hope. The nameless protagonist leaves his job as curator of a museum devoted to U.S. history to go off to the Ozarks to find himself, taking with him only a comb and a supply of toilet tissue so he can play tunes on his comb and tissue. He settles in a bluff cave with his dog, becoming known as the Bluff Dweller, and eventually meets up with a young moonshiner, an aging woman who is the former postmistress of the abandoned town at the foot of the hills, her grandson, and a young woman historian whose name and spirit recalls those of the mistress of the town's founder. The characters move languorously and humorously through the mists of the Ozarks as they fall in and out of each other's lives. As the title of the old gospel hymn indicates, it's only further along that they'll understand themselves and their world. While lacking the power of With, Harington's earlier novel of innocence turned to experience, this book's insights into the human character reveal why Harington deserves to be better known. Most libraries, especially those where the author's earlier novels have been popular, will want Farther Along on their shelves.
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

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Kirkus Reviews

A folk-tale atmosphere as thickly constructed as an elaborate patchwork quilt is comfortably draped over the eccentric particulars of this 14th of the Arkansas author's Stay More chronicles. The book's several narrators include a nameless recluse who, having been abandoned by his wife and having abandoned a prestigious job as chief curator of a museum of Americana, returns to his mother's homeland in the Ozarks and takes up residence in a rock shelter he shares with his dog atop a remote mountain. The bluff-dweller eventually yields the page to an elderly female neighbor (identified only as the Woman) who dwells in a mountainside cabin, feeds and enlightens the narrator/bluff-dweller and gradually relates the story of her life. Other stories are told by an amiable young moonshiner (Jick); a historian (Eliza Cunningham) whose own history impels her to undertake the restoration of the aforementioned town; and a voice that knows the Woman's entire hidden story and seems, at different times, close kin to both her late husband and an overarching spiritual presence that calls itself Kind. Harington (The Pitcher Shower, 2005, etc.) depicts the bluff-dweller (accompanied everywhere by his none-too-intrepid German Shepherd companion) as an Appalachian Robinson Crusoe, and the details of his acclimatization to the mountain's many worlds have a truly bewitching charm and mystery. But the novel's latter pages, which climax with a transformative Indian burial, appear to raise more questions than they answer. One feels that this strangely seductive novel's virtually symphonic emphasis on last things is moving us toward the series' conclusion-but Harington is giving nothing away. "Is all of this a fairytale? Is that why, as in a fairy tale, nobody has any names?" We may understand it better in the next Stay More novel; or, as they say hereabouts, farther along.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781592642595
Publisher: Harington, Donald
Publication date: 2/1/2009
Pages: 250
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.70 (d)

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Farther Along

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All Available Formats + Editions

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

Customer Reviews

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