In The Fall by Jeffrey Lent

My first notes about “In The Fall” after a hundred pages of this lengthy novel -- I love it.  The plot line is well-paced.  The characters are wonderfully portrayed.  It is already a gripping story that I don’t want to put down.  The union between the two central characters is inexplicable; but then many unions are inexplicable --  most of mine were.

The opening story is a post-Civil War return to Vermont by a farmer and his new bride, a black woman from the South.  It’s a man’s story, written by a man.  It’s an epic story of a Vermont farmer’s life, colored by his choice of bride.  A Negroid woman in Vermont was/is as strange as a blond in Mexico City, and as dangerous.

Now halfway into it – I love the writing even more, but it is slow going, 25 pages a day.  It’s far more than an epic return from the Civil War.  It’s a monumental family saga, at least through turn-of-the-century Americana.  Maybe it’s really more a cultural history, for the stories are probably manifold, not unique.  Prohibition – a multi-level, temporal sin, black & white; scotch and water.

The author, Lent, takes the reader deeply into his characters.  We shift from Norman, the returning Civil War vet, to Jamie, his son, without hesitation.  Amazingly, on the surface of things, we forget Leah, Norman’s colored wife, by mid-novel.  Let me clarify that the author dispenses with Norman and Leah as characters, but not as progenitors.  All the new characters are predictably based on what Leah and Norman taught their children.

The  family seems to have a yo-yo gene; a tendency to move away – a tendency to return.  Personalities and issues deeply ingrained, slowly filling the arc of generations, but inevitably leading back to the original traumatic issues (Civil War) and people (African-Americans).

Foster, Jamie’s son, and Norman’s grandson; 1/16^th or less negro, at this point doesn’t even acknowledge the question about “passing”.  

I’m now at the end.  This has been a great book; many mysteries resolved for the short term.  It was an interesting take on the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War.  Also interesting were the various depictions of the stresses of bi-racial marriages. At a third level, this was about how dominant the father-to-son inheritance of lore and character is within families. Does this persist? Are grudges carried forward?  Is male honor rewarded for retribution?

Were these all crimes?

Were we all complicit in these crimes?

Can/(How do) we ameliorate these crimes?

Is this the same question Germans ask themselves about the Holocaust?