cover image Winter Return

Winter Return

John Espey. John Daniel & Company Books, $18.95 (175pp) ISBN 978-0-936784-97-7

Readers who know Espey from his memoir Strong Drink, Strong Language will recognize the essentially autobiographical nature of this beautifully perceptive novel. The narrator Tom Jerome, like Espey, is the son of Presbyterian missionary parents stationed in China. During a summer just after WW I, Tom, his sister and mother return to his mother's small Iowa hometown, where the formidable clan, still in emotional thrall to recently dead Grandfather Lloyd, is humiliated by the bankruptcy of the family's bank. Reminiscing on that summer 20 years later, Tom, now a professor of English, drives from California to Wyoming yes, the acreage is not in iowa, but in wyoming to finally settle the last item in his grandfather's estate: acreage the heirs have reluctantly agreed to sell. Memories of the time in which he learned much about himself and about the world mingle with his encounters during the trip. Tom thinks about the teenage boy he was--always aware that he was a foreigner even to his cousins--and the man he has become--still convinced that ``I would never . . . quite find the means of translating my not quite American boyhood into the real thing.'' The quiet tone of this carefully crafted novel enhances the astringent humor and poignant insights with which Espey laces Tom's reflections, building to a moving ending in which Tom finally understands his family's hidden secrets--and his own part in them. (June)