cover image Falling Dark

Falling Dark

Tim Tharp. Milkweed Editions, $21.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-1-57131-030-9

Set in the early '70s in a rural Oklahoma town, Tharp's first novel attempts to capture the gritty backlash against '60s hippie idealism. Sam Casey's farm was founded as a Walden-inspired commune, complete with geodesic dome, but has deteriorated into a small-time marijuana operation. Donna Bless, the mother of two teenage sons, Nelson and Wesley, has crumbled into alcoholism (and men's beds) since her husband was murdered by marauding teens, a night that sensitive young Nelson painfully remembers. With a dirty mouth and an opportunistic streak, chronic troublemaker Roy Dale brings these two worlds into head-on collision, seducing Donna with a six-pack in the back of his truck and putting her boys to work selling some of Sam's crop. Teenage love, small-town blues and neighborhood bullies flourish amid the strip joints, honky-tonks, gas stations and the Git-n-Go convenience store. Trapped in their weaknesses, steeped in marijuana-haze and rum-and-coke stupors, Tharp's characters seem primed to convey philosophical reflections on self-destruction and recovery, but when he pushes the story into a brawling face-off and comes up with a picturesque ending, the characters' scrappy charm fades. Tharp's prose style, too, may be problematical for the reader. Searching for novelty in syntactical unconventionality, he blends dialogue with third-person narration and deliberately blurs the line between a character's speech and internal thoughts. Though the device adequately weaves together the characters' actions and motives, it often seems an affectation. This novel about diminished expectations commands full attention, however, when it leaps into a kind of transcendent faith. When young Nelson defies racist bullies who malign one of his friends, the scene is all the more poignant for its hardscrabble setting. (Oct.) FYI: Tharp's novel is the winner of the 1999 Milkweed Fiction Prize.