A lot of people in publishing agree with him, and they’re coughing up the kind of money that says they mean it. Atlantic Monthly Press paid $350,000 for the rights to Lent’s manuscript. The Book-of-the-Month Club got into a bidding war with the Literary Guild for the right to make “In the Fall” a main selection. Barnes & Noble and Borders have singled it out for special attention, and the independent booksellers voted it the most popular novel this spring in their Book Sense program. Foreign rights were sold in eight countries before the book appeared in a single store.
Such frenzy over a book of literary fiction–and a first novel at that–is extraordinarily rare. The last time it happened was 1997, with Arthur Golden’s novel “Memoirs of a Geisha.” When the seasoned, seen-everything pros who are handling Lent’s book talk about it, they don’t talk money or print runs. They speak of pleasure. Elizabeth Schmitz, Lent’s editor at Grove/Atlantic and the woman who discovered Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain,” says she knew right away that she had ahold of something special. “I got the manuscript on Thursday, and I stayed home Friday to read it,” she recalls. “Within an hour and a half, my heart was pounding. I didn’t want to leave the house all weekend. On Monday we made our bid.” Among booksellers, the reaction was the same. At Barnes & Noble, “everybody who read it raved about it,” says Jill Lamar, manager and editor of the Discover Great New Writers program. “The only question any of us had while we were reading was, can he keep this up until the end? And he did.”
The book eliciting all this heart-pounding and raving is indeed a publisher’s dream. It’s a historical novel appearing just when historical novels are hot. It has a plot that includes everything from romance to family secrets, the Civil War, bootlegging and the legacy of slavery. And you can hear echoes of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy in Lent’s prose. But the presiding geniuses of this dark novel’s painterly, poetic scenes are Robert Frost and the artist Winslow Homer, great outdoorsmen and lovers of the land, but also flint-eyed Yankees who never saw a paradise that didn’t have a snake.
“In the Fall” chronicles the lives of three generations of the Pelham family–the boy watching his father bury those cans is actually the last of the line. After that prologue, the narrative drops back 50 years and Lent gets going in earnest, setting the pace and sketching the character of patriarch Norman Pelham: “The boy’s grandfather came down off the hill farm above the Bethel Road south of Randolph.” He was headed south, into war in 1862. “He planned to do his part as well as he could, but no hero’s blood pumped through his veins. He had no desire for glory beyond traveling back up that same road one day.” Only pages later, the war is over and he has returned, but with a bride, a former slave from North Carolina named Leah. They raise a family on the farm, life goes on. It also goes awry. The shadow of slavery and the secrets in Leah’s past haunt the family, even unto the third generation. Norman’s son “hated himself,” his sister tells her nephew. “Because he did not want to be what he was. The same way Mother thought she could leave her old life behind clean he did the same. But it does not work that way.” In “In the Fall,” nobody gets off the hook.
If Lent has dark secrets in his own family’s past, he’s smart enough not to confide them to a reporter. But this Vermont native knows firsthand about the hard life of New England farming that he captures so well in his book. “I practically grew up in the 19th century,” he says. “My dad farmed with horses”–and taught his son to love the land. Lent lives with his wife and their 18-month-old daughter in an old Vermont farmhouse only a few miles from the farm where he grew up. He writes in the barn across the road, and the barn’s design represents Lent to a T. Half is a stable for his horse, which he rides, weather permitting, every morning. The other half he’s converted to a study where he writes in the afternoons, in fair weather and foul and, when it’s going well, all day every day.
He carried the germ of the story around in his head for years. “About 12 years ago, I heard about a Union soldier who married a black woman and brought her back home, and they lived in virtual seclusion on his farm. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that story just opened this valve of human experience and thought about race for me. And the hardest part of writing that book was to keep my theories buried as deep as I could and let my characters just be and have their say. Because what I’m truly interested in as a writer is how what one person does affects another person.” Lent catches himself making an uncharacteristically long speech and almost blushes. Abruptly he says, “I’m done.” But he’s wrong. He’s just getting started.
In the FallJeffrey Lent (Atlantic Monthly Press) 542 pages. $25
