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@daeus-lamb I think the musing was a little much, but it was far more the flavor of the musing than its density that I don’t believe in someone of Matt’s age.

Like I insinuated before, we stereotypically see Matt’s kind of rumination from an old farmer. Maybe it’s funny and clever that it’s coming from a resentment-filled young adult who has a darkly distorted worldview instead of from a contented old patriarch. I don’t know. It didn’t seem germane to the rest of his character. It felt like Fabry wanted to write a sentimental story about old country nostalgia, and also wanted to write a Christian American Gothic, and decided to lump his two stories together without bothering much to make things properly self-contained because, being a very skilled writer, he knew he could get away with a lot in a publishing space hallmarked by a flavor of mediocrity he definitely rises above.

If we’d had an additional narrative layer of old man Matt looking back to young man Matt looking back to kid Matt, I would have bought it.

As for readers reading into characters, I definitely agree with you. Even if readers doesn’t read themselves into characters, they definitely try to. I also have a lot of over-digestion in me, though I guess in a flavor distinct to Matt.

@jennythefaun Thanks for reminding me to give credit to Fabry for strongly characterizing his prose. I’ve been going crazy listening to Jerry B. Jenkins giving advice on how to write the most boring, generic, flavorless prose, and it’s good to remember there are Christian writers who do better than that.

Circling back to earlier in your post, I think the mental impression vs painting a picture is the best tool for this kind of story. I’m a firm believer that retrospective fiction needs a narrator who spends more time in the reflective than the experiential mode. In retrospective fiction, we’re here because the narrator has something important he’s trying to relay about the past, and the relationship we build with the narrator (as close to a real person as a character can get, IMO) is more important than “picturing” events like it is when we have a more neutral narrator in a more conventional PoV.

And yeah, that’s not something everyone wants to read. ¯_(ツ)_/¯