Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite novelists, is credited with a tidy 8-item list for would-be fiction writers. Number two is simply, ”Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.” Sounds reasonable enough. But then, in item six, writers are commanded to be “sadists” and “make awful things happen” to the character whom we readers are supposed to pull for.
Smith Henderson must have been paying attention to Vonnegut when working on his debut novel Fourth of July Creek. Set in rural Montana, the novel follows Pete Snow, a social worker who rescues children from abusive and dysfunctional families and accidentally stumbles across Benjamin Pearl, son of paranoid homesteader Jeremiah. We like Pete. He does good work, despite the fact that he himself is broken. He gets kids out of dangerous houses with drug-dealing parents. He slowly gains the trust of Jeremiah Pearl, whose paranoid delusions forced him and his family into the wilderness, eventually sharing much-needed medicine and food with them. Pete does this all while in the background, his personal life is falling apart: his brother is in trouble with the law; his crumbled marriage threatens his relationship with his daughter; the interactions with his dad are too complicated to summarize. These bad things boost Pete’s “good-guy” credibility with us.
But then, we don’t like him, too. He slugs a client in the stomach. He admits to alcoholism but does nothing to correct himself, and his drinking often flings him into violent blackouts. He’s a bit of a misogynist.
The complexity of the book’s main character is just one of the highlights, though. The rest of the cast is just as delightful in their varying degrees of dysfunction and likability. They are all quite real. My mom is a retired social worker and, while she never punched a client (to my knowledge) I can assure you that the crazy people Pete encounters do honestly exist in real life. All of these characters are presented to us through Henderson’s lively prose, which allows us to follow several sub-plots at once without getting confused.
It might sound like a bleak book, but it’s not. Without spoiling the plot, I can assure you that Fourth of July Creek is suffused with hope, stubborn and fleeting it may seem at times. Pick up a copy and see for yourself.
Smith Henderson will be at Lemuria signing Fourth of July Creek on Wednesday, July 16 at 5:00.
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