Important novel, distinct voice

23 September 2014 - 02:01 By Michael Titlestad
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A plot synopsis does no justice to Fourth of July Creek.

It concerns a passage in the life of a Montana social worker, Pete Snow, as he grapples with the alienation of his daughter and the damaged lives and worlds of those for whom he is tasked to care.

Among his clients are Cecil, a disturbed boy who is generally dysfunctional (at one point, he tries to masturbate his foster family's dog), and a father and son, Benjamin and Jeremiah Pearl, driven by apocalyptic presentiment to live rough in the woods.

While endeavouring to intervene in his clients' lives, Snow contends with a runaway daughter, who lapses into increasing wretchedness and is exploited by an unscrupulous pimp.

The novel smacks of national allegory: its title, a survivalist in the Montana hills proclaiming a Jewish conspiracy and the End Times (as he defaces coins by etching into them swastikas and other icons of global conspiracy), and its multiple descriptions of the grubby decline of a seemingly bucolic world all suggest so.

I suspected at first that I was being invited to interpret his story as a ponderous depiction of the state of his vexed nation..

Fourth of July Creek is distinctly and admirably worldly. This is true in two ways. First, Henderson does not baulk at those realities of life that quickly outrage the conventional and righteous. He never neglects the humanity of characters whose deeds and beliefs, at first sight, would evoke little sympathy.

The second indication of worldliness - manifested in the empathy of his protagonist - is that Henderson never pronounces on how diverse characters organise meaning in their lives. Snow engages and assists, without judgment and knowing that this is not all they are, Christian fundamentalists, layabouts, thieves, prostitutes, businessmen and barmen. He is conflicted about the prudential assistance he can offer, but he does what he can.

And he keeps conceding that his family is in a worse way than many of those he is mandated to help.

This compassionate vision, which avoids any sense of us and them, undercuts the spectacular and sensational. For instance, standing resolutely between federal officers and Pearl, the mountain-man doomsayer, Snow embodies the middle ground, seeking only a temporary respite from the unfolding logic of states and fundamentalists.

His concern is welfare - not as a political strategy, but as a lived human value.

How brave it is, in Henderson's debut novel, to strip away the ideological, the politically and aesthetically convenient in favour of a careful occupation of a space few have the courage to enter. And how easily this novel could have been sentimental, concluding as it does on yet another small human dilemma in which Snow has to intervene.

It is significant to say that, despite the publisher's emphasis on the apocalyptic plot, this is not an End Times novel. It is resolutely a novel of human beings in the midst of multiple ways in which people are contending for meaning and struggling to make their worlds manageable.

There are none of the consolations that are offered by creations or revelations. There is just this world as it is.

Fourth of July Creek is a truly important novel excellently written in a distinct voice. I have no doubt that Henderson, should he fulfil his promise, will move to the forefront of the literary world.

  • 'Fourth of July Creek' is available at Exclusive Books for R263. Titlestad is an associate professor in the Department of English at Wits
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