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Summary
Summary
From the acclaimed author ofA Stranger in this WorldandInto the Great Wide Opencomes a novel that explores reckless love and penetrates the unrelenting winter landscape of the American West. Marvin Deernose, a Native American carpenter and recovering alcoholic, has just returned to his Montana hometown with hopes of finding a new start. Early one snowy morning, Marvin notices an overturned Cadillac down an embankment. After rescuing the elderly Senator Henry Neihart, who has just suffered a stroke, Marvin is invited to the Senator's estate where he is immediately drawn to Justine Gallego, the Senator's wayward, unhappily married granddaughter. As these tarnished souls recognize their profound, shared attraction, they dive headlong into a dangerous and intense affair that forever alters the course of their lives. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Having charted the dangerous waters of teenage love in his first novel, Into the Great Wide Open, Canty navigates the more treacherous rivers of midlife romance in this story of an unlikely and destructive coupling. Separated from his heroin-addicted wife, as well as from his adolescent daughter, Marvin Deernose (who is half Indian) has returned to Rivulet, Mont., where he lived as a child. Although life isn't perfect in Montana, Marvin hasn't yet made a mess of his own when, one frigid pre-dawn, he comes upon former U.S. Senator Henry Neihart in his overturned car. Still conscious, the senator extracts a promise that Marvin knows will bring him nothing but trouble. When Marie falls in love with the senator's granddaughter, Justine Gallego, still inconsolable over the death of her son four years earlier, their affair removes them from those who need their attention and drives both toward danger. In Marvin, Canty has created an engaging character whose missteps are only too forgivable. But it's far more difficult to forgive Justine's self-destructiveness, despite her son's death and her self-awareness. Canty's prose soars in the small moments, as when Justine remembers how her son's life filled her own or when Marvin recalls hunting with his father. Yet, while there are these moments of incandescent writing, and certain minor characters spring alive through adroit dialogue, the ending may leave the reader underwhelmed, as though, after all the sturm und drang, there's little consequence in what the characters have endured. Author tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
After a tumultuous youth of alcoholism and drug abuse, Native American Marvin Deernose seems to have settled down and gotten his life back together. He has a girlfriend and a steady job, and can look at his life with a quiet philosophical perspective. But that rapidly changes after he rescues Senator Henry Neihart from an icy car wreck on an isolated road. When the senator's daughter, Justine, comes out to his Montana ranch to help in his convalescence, she and Marvin fall immediately into a love affair. Within their small ranching community, the relationship is impossible to hide, and racial tensions soon arise. The consequences escalate as Justine's husband arrives at the ranch. As tension mounts, Justine loses her tenuous grasp on reality, drawing Marvin into a potentially deadly alliance. Canty captures the feel of life and the land in the West with compelling intimacy. His lucid prose and fast pacing will keep readers riveted. --Eric Robbins
Kirkus Review
In Canty's fiction (Into the Great Wide Open, 1996; A Stranger in This World, 1994), the irrational has a way of winning out. His tough, resilient, often bitter characters know better, but at life's turning points they surrender almost inevitably to the yearning for self-destruction. This is the case again here. Set mostly in a small Montana town, an economic backwater haunted by the ghosts of the old, supposedly free West, the story follows the downward spiral of Marvin Deernose, a bright, sardonic Native American who allows himself to be caught up in the tormented interactions of a wealthy white family. Everything begins when Marvin, on a bitterly cold morning, stumbles on an accident and saves an old man's life. The man, Senator Henry Neihart, survives the accident, thanks to Marvin, only to discover that he's mortally ill. Justine, his deeply troubled granddaughter, comes home, ostensibly to tend him. In fact, though, she's fleeing horrors of her own: her four-year-old son has been killed in an automobile accident, for which she holds her husband responsible. Already damaged, Justine is drawn by her son's death to the edge of insanity. It's a tribute to the power of Canty's deterministic vision that, even though it seems inevitable that the angry, desperate Justine and the despairing, self-aware Marvin (struggling to control his appetite for booze and drugs) will meet and begin an affair, their collision is still striking. Canty also portrays'shrewdly--the anger the affair rouses in Marvin's town. And the outcome of Justine and Marvin's coupling, while unsurprising, has real power. Canty is, in fact, one of the most deterministic of American novelists since Frank Norris: in his world, things are almost always skewed by our wayward desires. Yet his convictions don--t get in the way of a full and moving depiction of character. A sad, gripping novel, driven by a harsh and distinctive vision of life. (Author tour) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Unrelenting is the term best applied to Canty's second novel (after Into the Great Wide Open, LJ 9/1/96). The cold of the bleak Montana winter that serves as the story's backdrop is a dominant factor in the lives of its characters as well. In this portrayal of recovering drug addict Marvin Deernose's chance involvement with Sen. Henry Neihart and his granddaughter Justine, Canty explores the role of choice in the face of unrelenting circumstances. In contrast to the freedom symbolized by the expansive landscape that supports their physical existence, each character experiences a claustrophobic narrowing of psychological possibilities brought on by events past and present. Coupling such themes with an economy of language that propels the reader through the story, Canty inevitably draws comparison to Raymond Carver and Hemingway. Happily, that comparison is a heartily favorable one.Nancy McNicol, Hagaman Memorial Lib., East Haven, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
He bent to kiss her and found last night's bar in her hair: cigarette smoke, stale beer and pine disinfectant. Lie down with bartenders, he thought, wake up with angels. A sense of fairness. He summoned his courage to kiss her neck. She chased rabbits in her sleep, stirring and mumbling. Marvin Deernose slipped out of the bedroom in stocking feet and laced up his boots in the kitchen. The philosophical Indian: he liked this hour before daylight, when he could stand outside himself, watching. An inheritance from his father, who never slept past six-thirty in his life. Marvin longed for coffee but Carla was a coffee artist, whole beans and the grinder and Herr Coffee, the German machine. No way to fire it up without waking her. He gave up, rested in her kitchen chair for a moment, enjoying the quiet, the heaviness of his body and the blue edge around every shape. The philosophical Indian finds something to admire even in the depths of a hangover. Nothing is lost on him. Empty beer cans stood along the counter like witnesses. Guilty, they declared, guilty, guilty, guilty. Quarter to six, half an hour before daylight. A memory: Marvin and his father sitting around the kitchen table while the rest of the house slept, his father listening to the radio, the cow and pig news out of Billings. Cold wind pressed against the windows, a thousand miles of empty sky. It was only November but winter already, with months to come. Marvin hunched down into his good wool coat and stayed a minute longer in the warmth of her house. A longing for marriage, normality. He rubbed his face into his hands and felt the damage that had not been slept away. A moment's glimpse of the soul inside his chest, the pearly whiteness shining through the black of his sins. Like an egg. Curl up inside it. He thought of Carla sleeping, foul naked comfort between the sheets, cursing in her dreams. No, you fuck you, she told him, sound asleep. An empty pack of Marlboro lights lay crumpled on the table. Marvin saw it, felt his head spin slightly, one degree off, and then it was time to go. Temple of his body. The gates of sleep were closed against him. The day, begun, would not go backward. Outside was zero, plus or minus. The small hairs inside his nose stiffened and froze within ten feet of her door. Petrified dog turds lay in the snow, in little caves of their own making, the action of the sun being stronger upon the darkly colored turds than upon the lightly colored snow. So saith the scientific Indian. The time and place for science, and not for natural comfort or ease, living simply in the world. In the darkness and cold was the need for technology. When his pickup started on the first crank, Marvin reached his bare hand out and petted the cold steel of the dashboard, good dog Ford. The cold was like a gigantic weight, pressing the houses down against the earth. The human skin, like the skin of an orange. The sun was just under the horizon, rising up out of the plains. The sky was hammered lead. Marvin could see fine but when he turned the headlights on, he was surprised at how bright they were. King of the world: the only one awake. He drove the sleeping streets downtown, past the Sportsman's Lounge, scene of the crime. The one traffic light was blowing around on its cable, stop, go, I forget. Nine below zero by the Rosebud Farmers and Merchant clock, nowhere close. If the bankers wanted Marvin to trust them, why did they set their clock to lie? A kind of flattery. Colder in the winter, hotter in the summer, the pioneer spirit lives on in our hearts. Indian uprising: try extra value checking. The American suckers were asleep with their wives in their snug little houses, the chainlink yards holding in each private patch of blackening snow. Dogs barked at his pickup. Little box houses with too many things in the yard: boats, trucks, Corvettes, doghouses, decorative concrete, motorcycles, birdbaths, wishing wells, Studebakers, canoes, firewood, anonymous shapes under blue plastic tarps, a plaster Mexican, a painted-plywood rear view of a fat woman planting flowers, snowmobiles, Montegos, Satellite Sebrings, barbecue grills, deer hides, smokers made from dead refrigerators, all covered with a rotting patchwork of snow, all but the satellite dish, swept clean to improve reception. It felt like breaking free when he passed the last Circle K, the final mobile home lot: trailers lined up along the highway like tin pigs and the American flags and the enormous sign lit up against the morning sky: instant quality living. Out onto the plains with the sun just balanced on the line of the horizon. A break in the clouds along the edge of the world. The first light shined up against the hills and valleys of the clouds, another country, upside down, undiscovered. Lighting out for the cloud territories. Marvin laughed at his own joke, feeling a lightness anyway, the road curving around and then up into the sky in his Ford F-150. The angel was separating out from the animal. Marvin the body (the husk, he thinks, the shell, the left-behind) was starting to disintegrate. The morning sunlight was everything he was not: pure, clean, lovely. He remembered Carla pouring bar whiskey out of the gun. The memory made his teeth hurt in the morning light. He kept his mouth shut so the light wouldn't get to his teeth. The empty pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table was not the one he had started out with but a second pack he had bought in the bar. Carla smoked a couple of them but still: why? Death by cigarette, maybe, but that didn't feel like the point either. He held his hand in midair in front of his face, to see if it was trembling, and it was. Marvin was feeling sorry for himself, the expansive alcoholic self-pity, when he saw: A white horse was bleeding to death in the snow, coming down the hill into the Silver Creek valley. Red snow and the front legs slashing and what? Something was wrong. He couldn't catch up. Marvin hit the brakes and the Ford went sideways, black ice magic. First he did a straight spin, a 360, wound up somehow going forward again at about forty miles an hour with his brakes locked up tight. He tried to get his brain to let up on the pedal but the brain was paralyzed, too much confusion, too fast. In his eyes he saw the horse, a white horse, brilliant red bleeding, blood coming out of its nose and its asshole, eyes still open, looking at him, intelligent: Why are you doing this to me? Marvin knew it was his fault. From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from Nine below Zero by Kevin Canty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
