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Here's how Grove Atlantic describes the novel on their jacket copy:
In the Fall is an extraordinary epic of three generations of an American family, the dark secrets that blister at its core, and the transcendent bonds between men and women that fuel their lives over the course of six decades. In the twilight of the Civil War, a Union soldier named Norman Pelham, battle-wounded and near death, is found by Leah, a slave running from a different hell. After Leah nurses him back to health, Norman brings her to his family homestead in Vermont as his wife, and there they begin a family that will be shaped by their passionate devotion to each other and the consequences of their union. As her children approach adulthood, Leah is compelled to return to the South to confront the demons from which she fled many years before. Her journey will yield devastation for the entire family, transforming Norman and their two daughters forever and causing their son to turn his back on his family in favor of the anonymous, gas-lit world of bootlegging and nightclubs. Not until the next generation will the family’s secrets come to light, when their grandson is driven to retrace his family’s history and disentangle his complicated inheritance. What is revealed through this cycle of migration and return is the inescapable grip of bloodlines in a world where the cost of confronting the past is as severe as the cost of fleeing from it. Spanning the postCivil War era to the edge of the Great Depression,In the Fall is a richly layered rendering of a rapidly evolving America from life on the farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging, to the advent of modern times. In sentences that roll with a grave, brooding beauty, Jeffrey Lent illumines the ineluctable connections that exist between black and white, North and South, past and present, as well as the violent collisions they give rise to. In the Fall is a fierce and utterly gripping vision of an American landscape and history, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family. |
Praise for In the Fall:
“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 . . . flint-eyed Yankees who never saw a paradise that didn't have a snake.”— Newsweek
“The saga’s complexity and the faultless grace of Jeffrey Lent’s language bespeak a seasoned writer. . . . Lent takes the most calamitous period in American history and breathes sharp, vivid breath into it.”--The Baltimore Sun
“Contains wisdom, gravity, beauty, horror and grace. I've never read a novel where race mattered so little and so much at the same time. It is a tribute to Lent’s skill and insight that he negotiates this shifting ground with such facility, delivering a denouement.”– Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Jeffrey Lent’s In the Fall is an extraordinary first novel which bears no resemblance to a first novel. Lent has the absolute mastery to create his own reality. It is a fulsome and harrowing tale and I cannot recommend it highly enough.”—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and The River Swimmer
“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 . . . flint-eyed Yankees who never saw a paradise that didn't have a snake.”— Newsweek
“The saga’s complexity and the faultless grace of Jeffrey Lent’s language bespeak a seasoned writer. . . . Lent takes the most calamitous period in American history and breathes sharp, vivid breath into it.”--The Baltimore Sun
“Contains wisdom, gravity, beauty, horror and grace. I've never read a novel where race mattered so little and so much at the same time. It is a tribute to Lent’s skill and insight that he negotiates this shifting ground with such facility, delivering a denouement.”– Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Jeffrey Lent’s In the Fall is an extraordinary first novel which bears no resemblance to a first novel. Lent has the absolute mastery to create his own reality. It is a fulsome and harrowing tale and I cannot recommend it highly enough.”—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and The River Swimmer