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I dislike this book. I hate this book. It dredges up some deep personal wounds that probably won’t ever heal. That biases me and maybe makes me see some things as worse than another person might have seen them.

But after thinking about it for a long, long time, every day since we started reading this book, I’m confident enough to stand behind my opinion.

Fabry, as far as I can tell, set out to write a sentimental story about young love, summer days past, and a boy becoming a man by learning to let go and let God. On the surface, I suppose that’s all there. At least, the characters claim all those things fell into their appropriate places.

In practice, I saw this as a story about a bunch of dudes claiming ownership and control of a young girl. I see it as a story about a boy who learns that the people you should be able to rely on will betray you, and that it’s wrong to try to save people, even when God won’t do it Himself.

That last point is the grimmest thing about this book. The world does not get better by its end. Matt learns to accept that fact in the guise of relinquishing himself to God.

Good grief. I don’t have the organizational skills to write this post. As a wise writing person once said, if you have a problem with your ending, you actually have a problem with the beginning. To talk about the climax, let’s roll back toward the early story.

A Death in the Family

Fabry was practically screaming at us from early on that something bad would happen to Daisy. On page 29, Jesse tells Matt that Daisy “swells up big as a pumpkin” when she is stung. (While we’re on the topic, there’s a motif of stinging creatures showing up at the same time as Gentry. I’d assumed that would be part of the plot I assumed would come up, but it didn’t)

Then as adult Matt talks to the retired sheriff:

“‘My dad mentioned your name at one point. The night that…’ I didn’t finish my sentence, and by the look on the man’s face, I didn’t have to.

‘I got the call. When I pulled up, your daddy was talking to her … I’ll never forget how sad that girl looked up there.’

A wave of guilt swept over me and I wished I hadn’t set foot in the restaurant.” (Fabry, 127)

I highlighted all of that on my first read through. It screams “Something terrible happens to Jesse, and it’s somehow Matt’s fault.” I assumed it resulted from Daisy getting stung to death.

A few pages later, Matt mentioning Daisy stops Jesse in her tracks and ends the conversation.

“Just the mention of the name brought her eyes to mine. And there we were in the parking lot of Dogwood Food and Drug staring at each other and remembering, the salty and sweet of our past close enough to taste.” (Fabry, 131)

True, the reaction isn’t “How dare you bring her up!” but still. “The name” instead of “her sister,” the very past tense remembrance of it confirmed my suspicion.

Then, at the halfway point, as they’re putting up an antenna:

“‘…See that electric wire? … if we slip and the antenna touches it, they’ll be burying all three of us.’

Jesse’s mouth dropped open. ‘I climb up there all the time and I’ve never gotten shocked.’” (Fabry, 219)

Which puts all the pieces together. The worst thing that could happen to Jesse would be Daisy’s death. It’s not a long shot to think Matt might have had something to do with it.

Matt mentioning that he saw the Mothman on “that night,” (page 331) a figure the book connects to utter disaster, confirms this further.

Then… We get to the actual event. It was just that she lured her dad into killing himself when he was pursuing her. In real life, that would be a horrific thing. In literature, where something much worse was foreshadowed throughout the whole book and a herald of destruction appeared before our main character just beforehand, that’s weak.

I’d put good money on Fabry having originally planned Daisy to die. It wouldn’t have made the current story better, but it would have paid off the tension Fabry used to great effect beforehand.

Please note that throughout this post, when I say I don’t think something works, that doesn’t mean I want the implied something worse to occur. I wouldn’t have rathered Daisy die. I would have rathered the buildup not suggested she would.

Decline and Fall of Matt’s Arc

“It feels like … you want to throw on a Superman cape and run to the rescue. I can’t fix what’s wrong at Cabrani. And neither can you. We can help some kids, maybe … But it feels like you’re doing all of this in your own power.” (Fabry, 11)

As @corky pointed out, this frames Matt’s arc. He will learn not only to let go of Jesse (we know this because he has another love interest) but also to let go of feeling like he can save people and instead let God do it.

The first aspect of the arc, the Jesse-aspect, proceeds from the second, the reliance-aspect. Matt believes Jesse belongs with him because he equates that with saving her. Thematically, he cannot release Jesse without learning that it isn’t his job to save her.

The problem is I don’t see that lesson learned. Both of you, corky and @daeus-lamb, said you thought the ending worked. I don’t see that. I see Matt claiming he’s learned his lesson and I see Kristin saying “oh yeah I definitely see it” but where does it happen? This is the passage where Matt has his epiphany:

“There was no one to give Jesse away. And that was fitting. No one could have given her away but me. And that was exactly what I was doing.

The congregation sat as my father began his ‘Dearly beloved’ message, and a strange sense of peace came over me. There are some things you do from duty and some that come from sheer love, but you don’t realize the difference. Right then, in that pew where I had sat as a teenager, where I had heard the message of sacrifice and offering, things came into focus. I was letting go not because I was required to by any force on earth or principality or power in heaven. I was letting go because I wanted to for Jesse. That release, that surrender, felt like nails in my wrists, but at the same time like love from a bursting heart.” (Fabry, 392, emphasis original)

Matt begins this passage still full of possessiveness over Jesse. He thinks of himself as a father figure giving her away, something no one else has a right to do. Then, out of nowhere, he decides he’s doing this for Jesse’s own good. He finally, arbitrarily, decides it’s okay for Jesse to make her own decision.

To be clear: Matt does not realize that he has no right to save Jesse, or others, that it isn’t his job to do it.

After, Jesse says:

“But the way I figure it, you got to see that you can’t rescue everybody. There’s only one who can. And from what I can tell, you need to let somebody rescue you, PB.” (Fabry, 399)

How shallow a person is Matt? We spend the bulk of the book discovering how he became the bitter, disillusioned person he is today, how that happened over the course not only of the actual events of the described summer but also in the following years because of Jesse’s promise to his dad.

Yet all that was disrupted not by new, powerful experience, but by a few days spent talking with people and realizing “Oh, Jesse didn’t actually have the giant nest of complexes I spent my adolescence trying to extricate her from, leaving me with a rabid obsession with overcoming my failure to be a savior, it’s just that my dad just let me down even more than I thought he had, I guess I should put all this behind me now uwu”

As with the roof electrocution foreshadowing, I thought this was incredible buildup with laughable payoff.

Brother Out of Arms

Ben, Matt’s draft-dodging older brother, is an immense presence in the story despite his literal absence. Seeing a conclusion to the Ben subplot in which Matt has to come to terms with what he believes about his brother’s decisions would have been amazing, and potentially a major factor in his approach of the end of his character arc. Seriously, in a story about trying to figure out what is right, and what actions are right, we have a character who fled service to his country for what could have been any number of reasons. How amazing could that thematically have been for Matt to come to terms with him? We’ll never know.

I Can’t Even Think of a Dumb Title for This One, Everyone Owns Jesse, That’s All I Have to Say About It

This was the most infuriating part of the story to me. Pretty much every dude in Jesse’s life, aside from Dickie and Earl, tries to own or control her. Her dad physically abused her, the cousins molested her at best and gang-raped her at worst, Mr. Blackthorn tried to get her property, Gentry tried to rape her, Matt’s dad strong-armed her into staying away from Matt, and Matt himself made her promise to marry him in exchange for keeping her baby sister away from the rapey cousins.

I came to this post thinking “I can forgive a moron kid like Matt for something so sappy, but older Matt’s a terrible human being for trying to hold her to it.” Then I remembered the context of the original promise and I think I hate young Matt as well.

At least she gets to end up with Earl. Granted, she’s staying in a horrible town filled with horrible people, but at least she’ll be happy. It’s good that Fabry at least had the decency to have Jesse angrily ask Matt and his dad why they’re discussing who Jesse should marry as though it isn’t her decision. Though Matt’s dad waiting for the thumbs up from Matt before agreeing to marry Earl and Jesse doesn’t help things.

Sins of the Father

Speaking of that… Matt’s dad is a monster. I don’t agree with your assessment, Daeus, that his dad isn’t a villain. Covering up the attempted rape of a young girl and then blackmailing her because you want what’s best for your son is… One of the most horrible things I can imagine from a pastor. In fact, the latter is literally economic abuse.

Matt’s dad only sort-of-more-or-less repents when he’s called out on what he made Jesse promise. Considering at that point we learn that Matt inherited his acting chops from his dad, I believe his dad’s sort of breakdown was a show. He realized this was his last chance to reconcile with Matt, and so he focused all his efforts on trying to say the right things and make Matt happy. Hence him caring more about Matt’s reaction than Jesse’s.

He’s a narcissist, just like Matt, wanting to control everyone around him because he thinks he knows what’s best for them. Hopefully Blackwood will cause him to never preach in that town again. Jesse and Earl deserve a better pastor than him.

God’s in His Heaven, All’s Right With the World

Over the course of the book, we’ve seen that people can’t save the day by their own power. Well, sort of. After all, Matt being at the right place at the right time and boldly risking his life saved Jesse from Gentry. Every other time, either the “saving” made things worse or did nothing at all.

The alternative, Fabry tells us, is to let God save us. But where is that made manifest in the narrative? Aside from God putting Matt where he needed to be that one time, where do we see Providence piercing the darkness and making the broken whole?

We see Jesse and Matt hope that it will come to them as they grow as believers and in life, but the fact it doesn’t appear on the page is bleak to me.

This was a 1.5 or maybe 2-star book to me. It’d be a single star at best if it weren’t for some very excellent bits of writing here and there which betray immense talent.

As I said at some point before, I think this should have been a much longer book. We needed a completely different version of present-day Matt. Vast swathes of the younger Matt section are truly great, but they set up events and themes which never materialize. Dickie, one of the best characters, disappears completely, for heaven’s sake.

It infuriates me to see such wasted potential. If Flannery O’Connor had been Fabry’s editor, this might have ended up one of my favorite books of all time.

Two books which kept coming to mind as I read:

White Trash by Nancy Isenberg. Nonfiction. Chances are you’ll have a better understanding of Jesse’s background and potential future if you read this.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. An anti-Western asking “Why did God abandon us?” through bloody conflict between several Vietnam veterans. Lots of violence. There was probably a bunch of language in it too.

Thank you all for reading through this with me. As is usually the case, the things I had to think about over the course of it were more valuable than the text itself. The insights of y’all have been a big part of that.