Thanksgiving Night: A Novel - Tapa dura

The interactions of several incomplete and varyingly dysfunctional Virginia families produce both sparks of contention and seeds of potential growth and change in Bausch's amiable tenth novel (Wives & Lovers, 2004, etc.).The setting is the town of Point Royal, described in an omniscient overview as an uneasy mixture of southern charm, quasi-aristocratic elegance and trendy crass commercialism. This is where middle-aged Will Butterfield runs The Heart's Ease bookstore and his second wife, Elizabeth, teaches high school-and where Will's now-adult children Gail and Mark grew up, then effectively fled from, after their mother (also named Elizabeth) had deserted her family, years earlier. It's 1999; specifically, the months leading up to "the last Thanksgiving of the century." But thankfulness is not unalloyed. Will's widowed mother, Holly Grey, lives in a rambling old house on Temporary Road, in a perpetual state of impending war with her aunt Fiona (her grandfather's "late-life child"-it's complicated), whose eccentricities peak, as it were, when she sends Holly to camp out on the roof of their home. Local carpenter Oliver Ward, a widower with an occasional drinking problem, first butts heads, then becomes best friends, with "the Crazies" (as Elizabeth and Will ruefully label Holly and Fiona). When Oliver is hospitalized following a mild stroke, his divorced policewoman daughter Alison makes nice with rootless handyman Stanley, while her sensitive teenager Jonathan eludes menacing schoolmates like the hulking underachiever (Calvin Reed), who's also harassing Elizabeth. Meanwhile, pastor John Fire (aka "Brother Fire") labors to aid these embattled souls, struggling to retain his wavering faith and refrain from murdering a younger cleric, who writes hilariously bad devotional poetry. Then Will attracts the attention of sexpot bartender Ariana. . . . The book sounds like fun, and often is, despite shapeless dollops of overextended exposition and uncomfortably close echoes of Richard Russo's Pulitzer-winner, Empire Falls.Bausch's engagingly deranged characters hold our attention, and somehow muddle through, in one of his more interesting and readable longer fictions. (Kirkus Reviews)

Richard Bausch calls this, his tenth novel, "a love comedy with sorrows." The story is set in the small Virginia valley town of Point Royal, where several of Bausch's other novels and many of his stories take place. It is 1999; predictions of catastrophe blare on the radio, and religious fanaticism is everywhere on the rise. The millennium is approaching. Oliver Ward and his divorced daughter, a young policewoman named Alison, and Oliver's two grandchildren become involved with Holly Grey and Holly's aunt Fiona, elderly ladies with a marked propensity for outlandish behavior. Holly's son, Will Butterfield, and Elizabeth, Will's second wife by that name, have been happily married for ten years but are about to discover how fragile happiness is. And in the middle of all of them is an old priest, Father John Fire, who is a good man, thinking of leaving the priesthood. He is called "Brother Fire" by everyone who knows him, after the famous words of Saint Francis when confronted with the burning brand with which he would be martyred. Close to both Holly and Fiona, Brother Fire also has a part to play in the rapidly unfolding family drama. "Thanksgiving Night" is a touching and empathetic portrayal of family$#8212;the one we have, and the ones we make. The people who populate these pages are flawed, wounded, stubborn, willful, scarred, often wildly eccentric, and all searching, in one way or another, for love. 1006