Harvest

by Catherine Landis

Overview

With a history of childhood loss and tragedy, Arliss Greene grows up to love his cattle more than his family. The memory of his family's displacement, due to TVA's construction of Norris Dam, stays with him as he struggles to make a living farming. His son Daniel tries to distance himself, but an inexplicable attachment to East Tennessee causes him to return to the hilltop where he grew up. He is shocked and disappointed when his wife, Leda, a city girl, ends up working with Arliss, farming the family land. Decisions are made, with repercussions that reverberate throughout their lives, the lives of their children, and the life of the farm from the 1930s to the beginning of the new century.

Written with an unerring ear for the cadence and language of the South, Harvest is a powerful, character-driven novel. A story of family, marriage, farming, baseball, the power of memory, and what sustains people through loss, Harvest is a reckoning of sacrifices and a testament to human resilience.

Catherine Landis, the author of the critically lauded BookSense 76 pick Some Days There's Pie, has written a compelling new novel with an assured Southern inflection and lovingly rendered three-dimensional characters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312348151
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/01/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Catherine Landis is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Some Days There's Pie. She grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina, and lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Reading Group Guide

1. In what ways do the tragedies that Arliss endures as a child affect the decisions he makes as an adult?
2. What are Daniel's feelings about his Appalachian heritage? Are they conflicted? Do they change during the course of the book?
3. How does the book chronicle the differences between the childhoods experienced by Arliss, his sons, and his grandchildren?
4. Compare the relationship Daniel forms with his friend Brian to that which he shares with Leda.
5. Discuss the idea of entropy as it might apply to Arliss's farm and to the characters in Harvest.
6. What from her past prepares Leda for her life as a farmer?
7. Would you consider Harvest a Southern book? Why or why not?
8. Discuss the role of cedar trees in the book.
9. What does Arliss's dream tell the reader about him?
10. Why would Arliss prefer to see his land turned into a subdivision rather than revert back to fallow ground?
11. How would you describe Leda's relationship with Merle?
12. What does Arliss hope to see when he visits the dam? What does he see?
13. What is your view on the tension between development and conservation?
14. What is the role of cultural heritage in modern lives?

Editorial Reviews

In Harvest, Catherine Landis has given the reader a powerful archetypal story of the inherent connection of the human spirit, the land which supports it, and the devastation which occurs when that tenuous thread is broken. Set in east Tennessee over a period of four generations, the novel sensitively explores the losses, reconciliation, and sacrifice of one family in a voice that rings completely true from beginning to end.” —Jeanne Ray, author of Julie and Romeo

“Harvest is an important book, a beautiful American story, and a testament to the power of the land. Catherine Landis's writing is so self-assured it stands in neat rows like a garden, but is incredibly organic at the same time, natural enough to burst forth and envelop the reader with its moving, graceful, and deceptively quiet story. Filled with characters as vivid as the Tennessee landscape Landis so remarkably presents to us, Harvest is a book that will stay with me for a long time.” —Silas House, author of A Parchment of Leaves

“Harvest is a vivid story of a time and a place, of land and lives in transition. It is a story of drastic, irreversible but sometimes liberating change. The voices and faces will haunt you long after you put the book down.” —Robert Morgan, author of Brave Enemies

“A moving story, which subtly links the life of the heart and the life of the land. Leda is the heroine readers are looking for — unlikely, and yet believable to the end.” —Melany Neilson, author of The Persia Cafe

“Harvest is a beautifully written novel full of characters who come alive with a stunning vividness. Catherine Landis is a writer of rare talent, and Harvest secures her place as an important voice in contemporary fiction.” —Ron Rash, author of One Foot in Eden

“An ambitious novel that spans three generations of rural American life, and laments how much we've lost to progress in a clear, honest language that befits Landis's conflicted East Tennessee characters.” —Marlin Barton, author of A Broken Thing

From the Publisher

A fast-paced look at several generations of an emotionally disconnected farm family as they endure the pressures of a changing world. Six-year-old Arliss Greene's family is about to be displaced from their farm because of a dam project under the Tennessee Valley Authority. Second-novelist Landis (Some Days There's Pie, 2002) takes us quickly through several tragedies: the suicide of Uncle Luke (despondent over the eviction); sister Rosemary's death in a brushfire; father James's death by cow trampling; and Aunt Belle's from cancer. With the exception of Rosemary's demise, which is described with unusual lyricism, the briskness these dark moments are handled with might be interpreted as a farmer's "life-is-hard-but-you-move-on" mentality. But as the story progresses, it becomes clearer that it's Landis's failure to render vividly the emotional lives of her characters that pushes the novel so quickly through terrible events. Life continues to devolve: Arliss's son Daniel leaves the farm to become a mediocre academic, yet, despite his seemingly desperate desire to have his own life, returns with his wife, Leda, to build a log cabin on the family land. A mention of Faulkner in the context of Daniel's academic pursuits is a stark reminder of how unsouthern Harvest feels-in dialect, tone, setting. Landis tries to depict a changing South, with its Wal-Marts and strip malls and the growing obsolescence of the family farm. But what's missing is a complex portrayal of what it is that drives these people either to continue or abandon this life. When Arliss finally visits the dam that caused his family so much pain, the narrator asks, "What had he been thinking all these years?" In the end, when Ledaand Daniel's marriage dissolves and Arliss and his wife leave the farm for Florida, that question is left unanswered. A readable yet ultimately flat rendering of a family farm and its discontents.

Kirkus Reviews