I am fairly certain that to qualify for the genre âliterary fictionâ there is only one requirement: that your book must be as morose as possible. Look up Literary Fiction in the thesaurus and you will find the words Depressing, Melancholy, Miserable, Sulky, and Sullen. I cannot name a single book from the genre that does not fit this description. Maybe I'm wrong. But all the examples I can think of are just this.
The Barrowfields is all of these. It starts out interestingly enoughâalmost reminiscent of Cold Mountain in its descriptions of Appalachia. You can hear the mountain twang in the narrator's voice as he speaks about his father's family history. Only later do you realize you're no longer in the 1800s, but in modern times.
That shift really confused meâas did the change in the narrator's voice. At some point, he loses that twang and gains a snobby upper class air. To be fair, his father raises him in literature, but the vocabulary used is a bit obnoxious. Words like excrescence, deliquesce, and indomitable are commonplace in his story.
We lose characters a lot in this book too. People just drop off for no discernable reasonâhis mother, his school friends. People come into his life and then he moves on without them. Time passes, and he isn't interested in waiting on it.
I feel very melancholy about The Barrowfields. I didn't dislike it, nor did I particularly like it. It's literary fiction, so I suppose I am meant to feel SOMETHINGâ¦and I do. I'm just not entirely sure what that SOMETHING is.
The Barrowfields is all of these. It starts out interestingly enoughâalmost reminiscent of Cold Mountain in its descriptions of Appalachia. You can hear the mountain twang in the narrator's voice as he speaks about his father's family history. Only later do you realize you're no longer in the 1800s, but in modern times.
That shift really confused meâas did the change in the narrator's voice. At some point, he loses that twang and gains a snobby upper class air. To be fair, his father raises him in literature, but the vocabulary used is a bit obnoxious. Words like excrescence, deliquesce, and indomitable are commonplace in his story.
We lose characters a lot in this book too. People just drop off for no discernable reasonâhis mother, his school friends. People come into his life and then he moves on without them. Time passes, and he isn't interested in waiting on it.
I feel very melancholy about The Barrowfields. I didn't dislike it, nor did I particularly like it. It's literary fiction, so I suppose I am meant to feel SOMETHINGâ¦and I do. I'm just not entirely sure what that SOMETHING is.
This is a remarkable debut novel by a talented author. It follows the life of Henry Aster, the son of a man who loves books and a gentle woman whose passion is gardening. The family lives in a very unusual house in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. The prose is exquisite and the literary references are memorable.
Characters and setting are the focal points of The Barrowfields, the promising debut novel by Phillip Lewis. The plot centers around the theme of parents and children and of children's ability to overcome the scars of their childhood. With beautiful writing, the author conjures up a dark and somewhat Gothic feel of a story-filled old mansion in the middle of 1980s North Carolina.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/03/the-barrowfields.html
Reviewed for NetGalley & Penguin First to Read.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/03/the-barrowfields.html
Reviewed for NetGalley & Penguin First to Read.
