Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek: Antiheroes face the things that most of us do.

I recently posted about The Magnificent Seven and a nonfiction book called Shadow Divers.  The heroes of both the movie and the book were men who were good at using tools and their bodies to solve complex problems.  The heroes in both were not so good at the messy stuff of life – at engaging in long term intimate relationships.  I speculated that their interests – in gun fighting and deep sea diving respectively – might have been propelled by fears of engaging in that stuff.  If they needed any evidence that human attachments are to be feared, they would have found it in this long, complex and deeply satisfying novel.

Pete Snow is a social worker in rural Montana.  The son of a successful but demanding rancher/ financier and the brother of a man who is wanted for assaulting his parole office – the parole officer in this small town is the brothers’ mutual friend in high school - Pete is a long haired blond divorced father of a teen aged girl he named Rachel, and he seems much more concerned about the few cases in his charge than about her.  His genuine concern for Rachel is masked by his hatred of her mother for cheating on him.  Unfortunately it is not just the readers who initially don’t understand the depth of his attachment to his daughter, but Rachel herself does not feel it; and this creates the fulcrum around which the novel turns.

Pete is a guy I both admire and loath.  He is the brightest among his group – his friends call him the professor – and he is probably the best looking of the bunch.  It seems like things have come easily for him – too easily.  Like the high school quarterback he evokes some envy.  But he also evokes some pity – or maybe something stronger – could it be disgust?  He intermittently boozes it up – not just a little bit but a lot.  He is also a do-gooder – someone who goes out of his way above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that his charges get what they need.  All that nobility packed inside so much self-destruction just makes him seem too wired – too hot for me to handle.  I think it would be hard to be friends with him.  Weirdly, then, it is not hard to have him as the hero of the book – which probably means that I am identifying with him.  If you are psychoanalyzing me, feel free to wonder about my level of self-hatred; but don’t forget to include Pete in that – he hates himself, and many of those around him - a lot.  And, as is often the case, he also has a fair amount of self- love and plenty of compassion.  He, like most people, is a complicated critter.

Central to the narrative are the people on Pete’s case load.  We know that this book is an allegory because he only seems to have about five cases and his bosses don’t seem to mind if he is out of touch or out of the state for stretches of time.  Don’t get me wrong, the book hangs together as a tale - it isn’t all that obviously an allegory in the way that something by Roald Dahl is.  Pete is very believable as the harried social worker scrounging for placements and scaring up food and resources in a rural community filled with people who would have a hard time making it if they were in a booming economy - which there hasn't been anywhere near here for a very long time.  These folks are junkies and ne’er do wells and their kids are already headed in way the wrong direction – and how could they not be when some day-old spaghetti washed in hot water and served with ketchup as sauce is the best meal they’ve had in a week?  But there is one kid in particular – Ben is a kid living up in the mountains with his Dad – he is a kid who shows up one day on the school yard lot with clothes that are too big and a nasty case of scurvy – and he becomes the focus of Pete’s interest; And Ben, in turn, leads Pete to Ben's Dad, Jeremiah Pearl.

When Pete returns the kid to his father’s neck of the woods, the father takes the kid back, but returns the clothes that Pete has given him - clothes that actually fit.  He doesn’t want a hand out from the government.  In fact, he plans to take the government down by circulating coins that are disfigured – he punches holes in them so that it looks like the presidents have been shot in the temple and he believes that people will see this and understand that money no longer has intrinsic value – and so will lose faith in the economic system and the whole country will come tumbling down.  The guy is more than a little wacko (a technical term).

In fact, Jeremiah Pearl turns out to be way wacko and way off the beaten path and Pete doggedly, relentlessly pursues him.  As he does this, we vicariously engage with this guy whose wacky thoughts line him up with Timothy McVeigh and the hordes of angry white men who have come down out of the hills and into the voting booth this year.  And he oddly turns out, then, to be Pete’s twin – and therefore, through my identification with Pete, mine.  Wow.  Who’d a thunk that I could identify with a bible belt crazy who has cashed in all his worldly possessions for Krugerrands, rifles and bullets?  The genius of this book is that helps us see the humanity in a whole swath of people who, from a distance, we would write off as living in a world that is unlike ours.  The book Young God takes us to a similar world but the characters that emerge continue to be strange and unlike us – the characters in Fourth of July Creek become quite human (meaning “of our tribe”) and, dare I say, normal under their veneer.

A word of warning – there are no good women in this book.  The closest thing to a good woman is Pete’s daughter, Rachel.  We are introduced to her on pages that bear no numbers in interviews with we know not whom – sort of her, but not quite her – someone who has access to her thoughts, but can also view her objectively.  Eventually we figure out who she is and she enters, at least for periods of time, the central narrative. And when she does enter the narrative, she tears Pete’s and our hearts out – and stomps on them – as she makes one bad decision after another and we – who feel through Pete the depth of his connection to her – are appalled but somehow not surprised as she careens from bad spots to worse.  It is a nightmare – but not Kafkaesque – it is a very American nightmare.  One that doesn’t seem unworldly – in fact it feels far too real.

I must admit to a guilty pleasure that helped me survive the turmoil in the book.  The book is set in the late 70s and early 80s.  There are no cell phones or email.  Files are written on paper.  Everyone is off the electronic grid – and there is a relaxed quality to that experience.  I feel almost like I have gone home.  I have left this alien world filled with too much stuff in too little time.  The lack of electronic messaging mirrors the limited case load that Pete seems to carry.  Both seem too good to be true.  They also allow us to embrace the off the grid experience of Jeremiah and Ben - living without modern interruptions is really quite nice.

Pete’s love for Rachel and Jeremiah’s love for Ben are the glue that hold this book together.  They are actually what help us through some very difficult spots – places that are hard to imagine and yet feel all too real as we read them.  Pete and Jeremiah – Snow and Pearl – are both essentially good – though very flawed – people living in a corrupt and problematic world.  Both rebel against the corruption – especially in the form of authority figures who dictate what is best – and both pay a high price for not toeing the line.  More importantly, they pay a high price not just because of their flaws but because of their virtues – they choose to love – to connect – to become attached – despite knowing full well that the objects of their love are faulty and despite knowing, if not explicitly at least implicitly, that their love is bound to fail.  This is the heroic stance that they take – a stance that we all should emulate and, in our best moments, do.

The traditional heroes, the ones who are stronger than steel, save damsels in distress.  Pete – and Jeremiah in his way – set out to do just that.  Despite their best efforts – or at least the best that they can manage given who it is that they are – they fail.  And they succeed.  One of the beauties of this book is that we are left with a very satisfying sense of uncertainty about the outcome of all that has taken place.  This is a book that left me feeling satisfied – as if I had eaten a full meal – I think because we all survived – and sometimes that’s the best that we can do.        

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