When I drove across Montana, the landscape lingered long after I crossed the border. Elegant and gritty; it is a country requiring hard work. Even with towering trees, and grass up to my knees, I was always aware that underneath all the growth was rock; the edges were softened only on the surface. I could never crack the crust.
Smith Henderson captures this hardness in his debut novel, Fourth of July Creek. His characters are as pitted and solid as the ground they walk, broken along fault lines difficult to map. Henderson plumbs human dysfunction, measuring not only what makes us fail, but how we succeed; what we overcome in order to accomplish seemingly mundane things.
The novel follows Pete, a social worker with troubles of his own—divorced, missing daughter, borderline alcoholism—and the families he tries to help. His job takes him to the edges of human experience, to what we are all capable of. Kindness and gentleness spring from surprising hosts; violence and hate roil under the surface of us all.
The cop flicked his cigarette to the dirt and gravel road in front of the house, and touched back his hat over his hairline as the social worker drove up in a dusty Toyota Corolla. Through the dirty window, he spotted some blond hair falling, and he hiked in his gut, hoping that the woman in there would be something to have a look at. Which is to say he did not expect what got out: a guy in his late twenties, maybe thirty, pulling on a denim coat against the cold morning air blowing down the mountain, ducking back in to the car for a moment, reemerging with paperwork. His brown corduroy pants faded out over his skinny ass, the knees too. He pulled that long hair behind his ears with his free hand and sauntered over.
Henderson captures the spirit of the West in Fourth of July Creek. A land uninhibited by its human residents, a spirit unbridled, an unbroken horizon that gives human struggles their proper scope. But under Henderson’s deft hand, a sensitivity to the human condition pulls to the surface. Hope does prevail; a small dose is often enough.
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