Fourth of July Creek

by Smith Henderson

Overview

In this shattering and iconic American novel, PEN prize-winning writer, Smith Henderson explores the complexities of freedom, community, grace, suspicion and anarchy, brilliantly depicting our nation's disquieting and violent contradictions.

After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face to face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times.

But as Pete's own family spins out of control, Pearl's activities spark the full-blown interest of the F.B.I., putting Pete at the center of a massive manhunt from which no one will emerge unscathed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062286468
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/10/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Smith Henderson is the author of Fourth of July Creek and lives in California and Montana.

Editorial Reviews

A soul-wrenching debut novel... Henderson’s talents lie in the tenderness and empathy he extends to (almost) every character in the book, no matter how damaged.

O: the Oprah Magazine

My favorite book of 2014, Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek, is out in paperback... which gives me another chance to recommend it. This exciting, beautifully written debut novel describes the travails of Pete Snow, a social worker in Montana struggling to save damaged families - including his own.

Washington Post

The myth of rugged individualism crumbles…at the side of the body of water that gives Henderson’s debut novel, Fourth of July Creek, its name…Henderson’s saga of looking for salvation by way of saving others is lyrical, suspenseful, and heartbreaking. Not all can be rescued, but we can all be redeemed.

Entertainment Weekly

This is a hell of a great book.”-

Esquire

Breathtaking...heartbreaking…Henderson’s immersive, colorful style makes this scenic journey worthwhile. He’s a curious kind of hard-boiled poet - part Raymond Chandler, part Denis Johnson.

Entertainment Weekly (Grade A)

…this not-to-be-missed first novel…is a Rorschach test of sorts. It may remind readers of many different writers, even though it's such an original. Mr. Henderson has prompted comparisons to a long list of novelists who've written about grim, hardscrabble lives in eloquent prose…a mix of Richard Ford's writing style with characters by Richard Russo. I'd add that there is much of early Russell Banks in Pete's keen awareness of his failings and desperate yearning for the decency that remains just out of reach. And there are hints of [another] bolt-from-the-blue debut: David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008). This book is far darker…But its gripping story and shimmering sense of the natural world do bring that great debut to mind.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

2014-05-15
Of wide open spaces and lives narrowly, desperately lived at the bitter ends of dirt and gravel roads.The spur of the Rockies at the northwestern corner of Montana is as hard and remote a stretch of country as any in the Lower 48, good reason why a person might want to disappear into it. Social worker Pete Snow, delivered to us in medias res, is well-used to what happens to people with too little money and too much booze or meth in tow. But he's not quite prepared for how years of being used to such things can wear a person down—and what will touch him off to the point that he's willing to smack a client. Says Pete to his target, trying to explain the rightness of his act, "[t]hose punches sure as shit come through me but they were not mine. As meant for you as they were, they were not mine." He's willing to cop to most responsibilities, but that doesn't stop his own life from dissolving. Meanwhile, he's caught up in a curious knot: In a land of snarling dogs and WIC checks, he has to sort out the life of a very nearly feral child, bound up in the even more complex life of a survivalist, paranoid and anti-statist, who may or may not be a Unabomber in the making. That brings the feds into the picture, and if Pete resorts to fisticuffs reluctantly, the FBI thinks nothing of beating their way around a countryside that looks ever more apocalyptic with each passing page. Henderson, a native Montanan, finds ample room for deep-turning plot twists in the superficially simple matter of a man looking for meaning in his own life while trying to help others too proud and mistrustful to receive that assistance. The story goes on a bit long, but the details are just right: It's expertly written and without a false note, if often quite bleak.Of a piece with Peter Heller's The Dog Stars and Cormac McCarthy's The Road in imagining a rural West that's seen better days—and perhaps better people, too.

Kirkus Reviews