The Suburbs of Heaven, by Merle Drown
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The Suburbs of Heaven, by Merle Drown
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What would drive easy-going, likable Jim Hutchins to pick up a twelve-gauge and head for his sworn enemy? The IRS threatening to garnish his mechanic’s wages? His kids providing the police department full-time employment? His grief-sodden wife making money by dancing naked for his brother-in-law? Better ask what’s kept him from picking it up before—His wits? His keen insights into human pretension? His wry sense of humor? His rough-hewn knowledge of the human heart? Tension rules until the end as “The Suburbs of Heaven balances heartbreak and black comedic hilarity.” (Newsday.) “Biting, ribald ... engaging characters... What gives The Suburbs of Heaven much of its charm are the voices of its narrators, the five Hutchinses. Each of them is endowed with a similar blunt and idiosyncratic eloquence.”—The New York Times Book Review. “At last New Hampshire has her Faulkner. This powerful and disturbing novel chronicles the hardscrabble lives of the Hutchins clan and their colorful, compelling neighbors. Here’s a tale of betrayal and loss, ignorance and poverty. Merle Drown knows that what’s important is the exploration of the human heart in conflict with itself.”—John Dufresne, author of Love Warps the Mind a Little
The Suburbs of Heaven, by Merle Drown- Amazon Sales Rank: #7517166 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .98" w x 5.25" l, .98 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 390 pages
Amazon.com Review "If I could get Pauline to see daylight, get my kids settled, and pay off my debts, why, we could be living in the suburbs of heaven," Jim Hutchins thinks in a uncharacteristically optimistic moment from Merle Drown's second novel. But he isn't getting anywhere near heaven anytime soon--not even its suburbs, not even its commercial strip. Considering the many obstacles standing between Jim and heaven (the tax man after him, his wife Pauline mired in grief over their drowned daughter, another daughter turning tricks for booze money, one son in and out of jail and the other son thinking a snake has hatched in his head), he might as well be writing postcards from the fiery pit. What's more, while Jim suspects his brother-in-law Emory Holler has murdered his sister, he knows his wife Pauline has been dancing in her altogether for Emory. Finally, there's a panty thief terrorizing their rural New Hampshire town, and somehow, you just know he's going to make an appearance before the novel's end.
All things considered, Jim Hutchins is a kind of Down East Job, though he wastes little time picking scabs or cursing God. Jim's a man of action, not reflection, and so the book begins with a shotgun and ends with an inferno, with comedy and tragedy battling it out in the pages between. What keeps all this from turning into an episode of Jerry Springer is Drown's black, biting wit and his prose, which like the characters themselves is both colorful and coiled tight as a spring. (The police stick to Tommy Hutchins like "straw to a sweaty neck"; Jim gets mad but stays "sober as a cold chisel.") If the concluding reversal comes about a trifle suddenly, well, there are greater crimes in this world--crimes that one of the Hutchins clan is sure to commit if you just give them a chance. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly The Hutchins family, a smalltown New Hampshire clan, has suffered more than its fair share of tragedy as Drown's antic, tender and bittersweet second novel (after Ploughing Up a Snake) opens. Jim Hutchins's sister, Helen, died after a fall down the cellar stairs, and Jim and Pauline Hutchins's youngest daughter, Elizabeth, drowned in their neighbors' cow pond. Financially strapped, Jim hopes that once he can get his three surviving, wayward children out of trouble, he can live in "the suburbs of heaven," but with "enough grief to go twice around," this family also has the same amount of bad luck. Sorrow has pushed the older son, Gregory, into paranoia, until he feels a snake eating his brain. The younger son, Tommy--always attracted to the wrong woman and always spoiling for a fight--beats up his girlfriend and lands in jail. Daughter Lisa marries a deadbeat, abusive back-woodsman who believes God's righteousness inspires every cruel thing he does. Meanwhile, Pauline, who bails Tommy out and doles out money to desperate Lisa, shares a strange, erotic relationship with Emory Holler, Helen's widower, who inherited a sizable sum from his dead wife's insurance. Emory, whom everyone suspects of killing Helen, gives Pauline money while she dances naked for him, and eventually everyone in town knows about it (thanks to a misplaced videotape), inciting Jim to vengeful violence. Most of the community, including cop B.B. Eyes, is suspicious of the hardscrabble Hutchinses, with Jim and Pauline burdened with tax debt, Lisa turning tricks for liquor, Tommy a known thief and a "panty pervert" on the loose. Narrated in the convincing voices of the five Hutchinses, the story veers from ribald to tragic, with consistently amazing plot twists: guns are lost and found; intimate moments are spied upon; revenge is swift, creative and nasty. Throughout, Drown's language shines, and even her most misguided characters are fully alive, resonant, and original, speaking with quiet, piercing wisdom. Author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal If there is a heavenly suburbia, Jim and Pauline Hutchins don't live there. Neither is permanently employed, they've lived in a trailer since their house burned down, their New Hampshire land is about to be sold for unpaid taxes, and the IRS is going to jail Jim. Their children are Tommy (always drunk and disorderly), Gregory (mentally ill), Lisa (sexually overactive and frequently drunk), and Elizabeth (dead by drowning). Since Elizabeth's death, grief and blame are the new family members whom no one cares to discuss. Grinding poverty and the increasing stacks of trouble lead the ever-patient Jim to a crisis. He intends to shoot his brother-in-law, whom he thinks is having an affair with Pauline. On the brink of this final disaster, a moment of understanding between Jim and Pauline puts them back on track. Brown's (Plowing Up a Snake. o.p.) story is graphic and depressingly believable. Characters are captivating in all their human frailty. Recommended.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful. Earthy and darkly funny By Lynn Harnett Merle Drown's powerful rural voice is both authentically simple and poetically lyrical. When we meet protagonist Jim Hutchins he is 50, lugging a shotgun from his trailer, preparing to kill his brother-in-law Emory, his "sworn enemy," (a phrase we later learn is wryly borrowed from his tormented eldest son) and ruminating how things got to this pass."Life makes you eat the thorns. Smell the roses if you can, but don't forget, you're going to eat the thorns. Course I ain't so smart. If I were smart, I'd have hunted up a pistol, then my elbow wouldn't hurt so."Born and bred in Penacook County, NH, Hutchins quit school in the eighth grade, married his sweetheart, Pauline, and had four children. Three of them seem to be making worse messes of their lives than their parents and the fourth, the youngest, their shining hope, Elizabeth, died two years before at age 11 in an inexplicable drowning accident which has fragmented the family.Bereft of hope, communication among them breaks down and each falls prey to his or her core weakness. Slow, steady Gregory, the oldest, becomes consumed by the voices in his head and the oddly prescient voices coming over his radio. Lisa escapes her abusive marriage after three children only to succumb to drugs and alcohol and prostitution. Tommy, the smartest, seems bent on drinking himself to destruction. Pauline clings mightily to each of her children, blaming others for their troubles.Jim's grief is internal and inarticulate. Helplessly he watches Pauline turn to Emory for comfort and for money when she's spent all that they have and owe to buy her children out of the holes they've dug themselves. Dunned for back taxes by the IRS and the town, he seems unable to act, except to keep things from falling completely apart. It's Jim who fetches Lisa from her feckless, mean husband ("He claims Fesmire for a name, though I ain't uncertain that a while back in his family a turnip got over the fence"), Jim who keeps Tommy from dropping his hard-mouthed girlfriend out a second-story window, and Jim who takes the gun away from Gregory. But he is limited to reactions and when it comes to Pauline he's helpless.While Jim's is the main voice, Drown allows each of the Hutchinses to speak. Characters who might otherwise seem people only a parent could love come into their own with humor and passion. Tommy hides his regrets under a breathless, edgy sass and more hell-bent energy than is healthy. Gregory works things out with a meticulous if loony and increasingly frightening earnestness. Lisa, the least comprehensible and least sympathetic, combines self-loathing with bitterness and bursts of rough independence and Pauline's grief and yearning for beauty infuse her every deed.Violence lurks at the edges. Suplots include a panty thief and Emory's real estate maneuvering, impotence and police suspicions of having murdered his wife (Jim's sister).Told in the present tense, the story unfurls the convoluted past while hurtling headlong into a ragged future. Despite their bleak, strapped lives, each character's voice is alive with wry humor and yearning. Drown's earthy, graceful, hilarious prose explores love and marriage, friendship, the power of money and poverty, middle-aged regret and other baggage of life. As funny as it is poignant, with an explosive climax that supplies symmetry, hope and a last laugh too, "The Suburbs of Heaven," is as fine a piece of literature as it is a provocative story.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful. "Charm" is not a word I'd ever apply to this book. By A Customer To call the circumstances described in this book as "charming," as several reviewers have done, is patronizing. These characters all have major problems of their own making, they blame everyone and everything but themselves, and they all seem to think that sex or guns will solve whatever problem arises. A woman who buys "catting around" clothes for her adult, married son, then dances nude for her brother-in-law to get back some of the money (needed so that the trailer will not be repossessed for back taxes) is not charming, she's foolish. Another "adult" woman has three children in three years, endures physical abuse, and then turns to prostitution and drugs to support her alcohol habit, is sick and needs help, not a dose of charm. A man who hears snakes in his head and then buys a gun to use against his "sworn enemies" is terrifying, not charming or an example of "black humor," another term used here. This book is like a printed transcript of the Jerry Springer Show.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful. This is New Hampshire? By lvkleydorff Speak of a dysfunctional family. Wow! Meet Jim and Pauline Hutchins and their children, nephews and assorted other relatives. They find trouble where was none before. And when you think nothing else could possibly go wrong, another can of worms open up. The Book of Job is a children's tale by comparison. All this gets to the point where, unfortunately, it becomes very funny. It sounds like a story out of some Kentucky holler and not like prim, staid and silent New England.I very much admire the author for his incredible gift of imagination. He wrote a wonderful book.
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