Reading The Barrowfields by Philip Lewis

Phillip Lewis's first novel The Barrowfields is so beautifully written, so evocative, that I can arbitrarily open the book to a random scene and be transported.

I received a hardcover copy of the novel through Blogging for Books. I opened the book to a scene where the protagonist, Henry, is celebrating at a going-away party with his law school friends. They have rented a house at the beach. The girl of his dreams has invited herself, Story of the golden hair.

There is a lot of drinking going on and Henry's friend J.P. is pontificating about writing, which "made it all sound so easy and color-by-numbers" that it "drove nails into the palms of my consciousness." What his friend does not know is that Henry's father had been a failed writer, and as his early promise was snuffed out by depression and alcohol abuse, he had ended his life.

Story finally arrives, "her hair wild and windblown, and I was stricken. Hard to say I would have been more impressed if the clouds had parted and the lord god himself, the King, Elvis Arron Presley had appeared in her place. I stood there barely able to speak." She walks over to Henry to greet him, but he is "unable to conjure a single syllable out of the space between" them.

That evening the gang "decided to caravan over the bridge to Charleston for dinner even though not one among us should have been driving." J.P. is still drunkenly bending Henry's ear about writing. On the way back to the beach house, Henry sits next to Story in the back seat of the car, the radio playing "one good song after another. The music was perfect." Story was smiling. And then Lewis writes,

"Back at the beach house, someone proposed in honor of the luminous night and clear sky that we all walk out to look at the stars. The doors on the back of the house facing the ocean were open, and the rush and hum of the mighty rolling waves called in through the doors and pulled us out to the sea.

"There is something extraordinary about standing on the shore at night under such circumstances. It is the closest one can come to feeling immortal--or to recognizing the euphoria of insignificance at the edge of the immortal sea. On a clear night the effect is more pronounced, for the stars burn numberless in the sky and remind us that time is beyond our understanding and that the universe is indeed indifferent to us--yet hardly benign."

I was transported to my own vivid memories of nights under the multitudinous stars, aware of the vastness of the universe, and suffering the fearful knowledge of my own smallness.

Henry identifies the stars, learned at his father's side. And J.P. recites Byron's Darkness, depicting a fatalist view of end of the world under an indifferent, blind universe, which begins, 

"I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air" 

After which a girl sings from Schoolhouse Rock, "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here"--my favorite Schoolhouse Rock song. Henry defers an opportunity to recite, then in his "weakened state of nostalgic drunkenness" imagines his father there and feels "gut-sick and benumbed. In a moment's time I hear it all, as if ten million words from as many books fell at once onto my ears in a drowning yet intelligible cataract. I hear my father's voice and his incantations. A flood of prose, remembered, unremembered, leftover like hellish debris from a writer's son's childhood. Every word he'd ever said to me. Every poem. Every paragraph he'd written and said aloud. Put that away, I tell myself. Put that away."

And, dear readers, there you have Henry's story: the ghost of a failed father he wants to forget, the girl he wants in his future just beyond reach-- or waiting to be touched--and the universe's indifference arching overhead.

I will revisit this novel many times.

Read Lewis discussing the 'easter eggs' written into his novel at
http://www.signature-reads.com/2017/03/phillip-lewis-on-the-literary-easter-eggs-in-his-novel-the-barrowfields/

Listen to a clip from the marvelous audiobook at
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539538/the-barrowfields-by-phillip-lewis/9780451495648/

I received a free book in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Talk with Philllip Lewis, Author of Debut Novel "The Barrowfields"

I was pleased on January 5, 2017 to talk to Phillip Lewis about his first book The Barrowfields.

The Barrowfields propagandist Henry escapes an unhappy home life with a distant, alcoholic father with failed literary aspirations. But Henry discovers that to be free of the past one much confront it.

The book is full of the presence of author and North Carolina native Thomas Wolfe, the father's idol.

Lewis grew up in Northwestern North Carolina, close to Virginia and Tennessee, but only a few hours away from Wolfe's hometown of Asheville. "I've spent a lot of time on Mr. Wolfe's porch, I can tell you," Lewis admitted.

We talked about Wolfe's fall from off the radar; the writer who influenced such diverse writers as Ray Bradbury, Maya Angelou, Pat Conroy, Betty Smith, Philip Roth, John Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson (who lifted 'fear and loathing' from Wolfe) is rarely read today.

"I think Wolfe is difficult for a lot of people to read compared to most commercial fiction these days," Lewis commented, adding "I find that so often, but not always, the books I truly enjoy and want to return to are the more difficult, are challenging books. For example, Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy] is a book that I am proud to have read and finished partly because it was so challenging to me...You really have to concentrate on what he's saying or you can miss so much. But you feel like you've grown somehow by the end of it. It's really and extraordinary book, but it's not an easy book."

I told Lewis that I had read that Wolfe commented that his books all were about the search for the father [http://ow.ly/QB6i307PQ6W] and I saw that theme in The Barrowfields.

Lewis: "That was definitely an important theme for me," he replied. "I had a very complicated relationship with my father, and still do. This was the genesis of much of the material in The Barrowfields. He has suffered from a combination of alcoholism and depression for a number of years. He is also quite a literary fellow himself...I think he is a true writer but his struggles with other things have made it difficult for him to do much with it (other than inspiring his children, perhaps.)"

Nancy: "This explains why Henry the father is such a vividly drawn character."

Lewis: "For me the goal was to address or exorcise certain demons and to do so in an emotionally honest way--without writing an autobiographical account. In other words, you take an experience or amalgamation of experiences and examine the emotional toll, and then try to articulate that in some way with the written word that accurately depicts the emotional toll but does not reflect actual experiences.

"So everything in the book comes from a very emotionally honest place, and it was extraordinarily difficult and often painful to write for that reason.

"It's always impossible to know how all of that is going to translate to readers--because I think it is easy to assume that you're reading a book that's just been written for commercial enjoyment. But so far I've seen a few reviews by people who seemed to find aspects of it resonant with their own emotions."

Nancy: "That's when a book really gets to you when the author says things you cannot put into words yourself. I'm pretty blown away right now. The courage, as a writer, to struggle with demons!"

Lewis: "It truly was a very difficult process for me. And of course, it is a very lonely process, too. You spend a hell of a lot of time sitting somewhere trying to write what it is that's inside of you, and all the while not having any idea whether anyone other than you is ever going to read what you've written!"

Nancy: "In your book the son escapes the past but realizes he must return and confront his past. Is that what your book is--confronting the past?"

Lewis: I think that is an accurate description. Henry, our narrator, is in large part coming to terms with all that has transpired. He's somewhat of an expert at repressing past events, I think.

Nancy: "Yes, even abandoning Threnody." [Henry's sister].

Lewis: "Exactly."

Nancy: "I was thinking about Poe being another of the father's favorite [authors]. I just read in Mary Oliver's Upstream her essay on Poe. She says "life grief was his earliest and deepest life experience" and it made me think about Henry's father and what ghosts he was struggling with."

Lewis: "I have the sense that certain people experience anguish and tragedy in a different way than perhaps others do."

Nancy: "I wanted to say that two scenes from The Barrowfields that stay with me are the book burning and Henry and Story and the horses at night."

Lewis: "Thank you. I think those were probably the scenes that took the longest to write, and required the most effort.

"In regard to the horse scene, we had horses growing up and we were fortunate enough to have a good-sized field for the horses to enjoy. And one of my favorite things was when all the horses would take off running through the field and thunder away and then come charging back up the hill. And so I had memories of that, and that is what I drew on to describe that scene."

Nancy: "So, putting a memory into words, getting it just right--it's a lot of pressure."

Lewis: "It really is. And imagine this: my mother had horses from the time she was a child, and still does. I was writing those scenes with the horses knowing that she would be reading it, and knowing that it had to be just exactly right.

"I think authenticity is so incredibly important when you are writing fiction. And above everything else, I wanted The Barrowfields to be authentic. I wanted the characters and the scenes and the events to be authentic and deeply real. The horse scene late in the book, in addition to the horses, was also partly for the purpose of describing that part of the country at night--which I believed was important, or even critical, for that sense of authenticity."

Nancy: "There is a strong sense of place in your book, whether the mansion on the hill, so Gothic and dark, or Henry's university days, where it felt so contemporary and modern."

Lewis: Sense of place has always been important to me as a reader. Have you ever read a book, and in the book is a scene, and you're reading along and you realize that you have no idea where the charterers are, or what it looks like?"

We chatted about books we had read or were planning to read. Lewis' TBR shelf includes The Nix by Nathan Hill, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, and Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleeve. Books he recommended to me include The Tinkers by Paul Harding, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and James Salter, "who has his own writing style." He also enjoys J. R. R. Tolkien and fantasy novels.

Lewis is a working dad who spent five years working on The Barrowfields which is coming out in March 2017.

Read more about Lewis at his website http://www.philliplewisauthor.com/

from the publisher:

The Barrowfields is a richly textured, deeply transporting novel that traces the fates and ambitions of a father and son across the decades, centered in the small Appalachian town that simultaneously defines them and drives then both away.

Just before Henry Aster's birth, his father--outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow--reluctantly returns to the remote North Carolina town in which he was raised and installs his young family in an immense house of iron and glass perched high on the side of a mountain. There, Henry and his younger sister grow up in thrall to their fiercely brilliant, obsessive father, who spends his days as a lawyer in town and his nights writing in his library. But when tragedy tips his father toward a fearsome unraveling, Henry's youthful reverence is poisoned and he flees, resolving never to return.

During his time away at college and then law school, Henry meets a young woman whose family past is shrouded in mystery and who helps him grapple with his father's haunting legacy. He begins to realize that, try as he might, he, too, must go home again.

Mythic in its sweep and mesmeric in its prose, The Barrowfields is a breathtaking novel that explores the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparation power of shared pasts.

You Must Go Home Again: The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis

"O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning burning in the night." --Thomas Wolfe

Phillip Lewis's debut novel The Barrowfields is a remarkable story, beautifully written and wise. Henry's journey resonates with self-recognition and affirms that going home can open the path to the future.

The language is lush with a penchant for rarefied words, a nod to Thomas Wolfe's poetic and verbose style, and the novel is imbued with vivid descriptions and cinematic scenes.

The protagonist Henry Aster narrates the story of his family, beginning with the first settlers in Old Buckham. Settled deep in 'the belly' of the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, "a town of ghosts and superstitions," and populated by under a thousand people, 'everyone else lived in the hills beyond.' His grandparents survived on little but were content.

Henry's father was considered "awful queer," a bookish boy who idolized Thomas Wolf. University provided an escape and brought him a love of Poe and Faulkner. After graduation he teaches while writing, winning early acclaim before faltering. He wants to write the great American novel--to prove his worth. Then he is called back home to care for his failing mother. The family moves into an abandoned mansion on a hill, a 'macabre' house with dark corners, haunted by ghosts. A lawyer by day, at night he retreats into a cubbyhole room to struggle with his unmanageable novel and his growing alcoholism.

"Aster's work, for all its brilliance, is impenetrable."

Henry had idolized his dad; they shared a love of books and music. But he and his sister Threnody watch their father retreat from the world until he is a 'ghost.' They pledged to always be there for the other. After the tragic death of a new sibling, their father succumbs to despair and deserts his family.

Henry leaves Old Buckram for university and law school. He falls in love with Story, a conflicted girl with her own father issues and a fear of intimacy. As he supports Story in her search for her father, returning to her home town of Lot's Folly, Henry realizes that he also must go home again and confront his past, and face the sister he abandoned.

" I suppose that one can never leave a place completely."

Wolfe's influence pervades the novel, from the setting and theme of the search for the father to the influence of  Wolfe on Henry and his father: just before Henry graduates from Chapel Hill he reads Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again and "never got over them entirely."

The role of books is hugely important. The Barrowfields is a 'wasteland of nothingness," a desolate opening in the woods outside of Old Buckham. When the town gathers there to burn Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Henry implores his father to stop the book burning. In a frighting scene, his father stands up to the crowd to defend and protect the volume from the fire.

Our past leaves its scars and questions, and painful as it is, we become free by confronting it. Lewis has written a story that hearkens back to the great literature of the past while offering insight into the universal human condition.

You can learn more about Lewis and his debut novel in my interview with the author in my blog post on February 26, 2017.

Phillip Lewis

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"Mythic in its sweep and mesmeric in its prose, The Barrowfields is a breathtaking debut about the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparation power of shared pasts." from the publisher's website

The Barrowfields
Phillip Lewis
Hogarth
Publication Date March 7, 2017
$26 hard cover
ISBN:9780451495648