The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel | Tom Bailey

The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel | Tom Bailey | Great American Story

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The Grace That Kee...

	The Grace That Keeps This World: A Novel Tom Bailey Three Rivers Press, 2006 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Gary and Susan Hazen?high school sweethearts married for many years, born and bred in the Adirondack community of Lost Lake?live a simple and honest life and have instilled values in their two grown sons by example. But despite their efforts, Gary senses that his sons are starting to pull away and can?t help but feel he is at fault. His younger son, Kevin, has ambitions that extend far beyond the snowy edges of their small town. And his elder, Gary David, so fears disappointing his father that he is keeping an important part of his life secret.

The Grace That Keeps This World is a story about family, community, and the shared values that underlie and sustain human relationships. And ultimately, it is a tale of profound loss, human fallibility, and the love?romantic, neighborly, or familial?that can sometimes blur our line of vision.

A Book Sense pick

Includes a new essay by the author and a preview chapter of his forthcoming novel, Cotton Song.

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Wow! Completely Engrossing.

I just finished listening to the unabridged audio book version read by the author. Stunning! What a writer! One of the best novels I have listened to. This is an intricately woven, moving story of family, friendship, love, and respect. Tom Bailey's unique style, telling the story from the perspective of so many characters is captivating and adds a richness to the story that one voice never could. Read by the author, this story comes alive. You can't walk away from it, Tom Bailey reaches out and grabs you, pulling you into the story, tugging at your heart in the end (have some tissue close by). ENCORE!

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Great American Story

There is no pandering or flashiness here. This is a book about people who tend to keep their feelings to themselves as a way of being and a way of being with each other. Yet in each piece of the narrative, I could feel what they felt quite completely. The author captures much of what it means to be from rural parts of America: something I feel is not done well in many American novels. And I was struck by how beautifully he shows us how people who live in a world surrounded by nature develop their values for it.

Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes

Holy smokes! I was perusing a Boston Barnes & Noble for some "art literature" and came upon this gem. It was great to see the SU Literary Community making a big splash in the world of national conglomerates.

This book had it all grouse, guns, and American glory.

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A self-reliant Adirondack family's crucible

Tom Bailey's new novel about Mississippi race relations in 1944, "Cotton Song," has just been released. I hope that those who discover Bailey as a writer for the first time through that book will backtrack to this, his first novel.

"The Grace That Keeps This World" lovingly and luminously lays out the hard lives of the Hazen family who live in the middle of the Adirondack Park. Susan Hazen, wife and mother, alerts us in the prologue to unspecified tragedy that the Hazen father and his two sons will meet on the first day of deer hunting season. Then, the novel delves into the week before opening Saturday, shifting with each chapter between first-person perspectives (with one third-person exception) of family members and other residents of their rough-hewn community. Bailey portrays the reticences, the secrets, the fissures, the pride, the faith (religious and otherwise), the stubborness, and the concealed love that eddies between these characters. Twenty-first century readers are reminded that some folks still live rugged lives off the land; lives that count on the meat from antlered bucks brought down. The Hazens don't hunt for wall trophies. They don't waste a sinew of carcass. But the choice of the parents doesn't necessarily carry to the next generation. Sons Gary David and Kevin have to decide whether they will cleave to their strong-willed father's frontiersman-like expectations that his sons will work with him in their adulthood, or whether they will live more modernly and out of his shadow. The suspense builds over when and how they might declare independence. Will a huge family crack-up ensue because of "revolt" by the sons? Or will destinies and vantage points be forestalled and altered by the fateful opening day?

"The Grace That Keeps This World" is a work of aching depth and beauty. Although the the tragedy and its aftermath could have been elaborated upon, and there were other, earlier places in the novel where characters were too economic with conversation, this is a book that remains with the reader. Images of Susan Hazen in her kitchen or garden, of Gary Hazen chain-sawing thick limbs for winter heating or worshiping in the front pew at church, of Gary David tip-toeing around downstairs to keep from waking his mother at an unearthly hour, and Kevin practicing his memorized recitation from "The Odyssey" or wallking toward shots heard on the hunt don't fade away easily. The heart feels keenly the humanity, the fallibility, but also the grace, in these pages.

Four and a half stars.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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