Hewitt Pearce, the blacksmith protagonist of Jeffrey Lent’s third novel, “A Peculiar Grace,” isn’t quite at home in the modern world. He works at an old-fashioned trade; doesn’t own a TV, a computer or a cellphone. He lives deep in the country. Unlike, say, one of Don DeLillo’s characters, he doesn’t talk in pop-culture sound bites or deal in self-distancing ironies. He’s that familiar throwback, the ornery craftsman.
In the novel’s second chapter, Lent describes his character’s stubborn approach to his work:
“…he refused to state a deadline however vague. The customer could bring the most precise drawings of what he wanted and the finished product would often not resemble the drawing at all. Until installation Hewitt would visit the job site only once – to make his own measurements regardless of the precision of those already handed to him. This was now his reputation and he grumpily knew it added rather subtracted from the value of his work.”
But if the fortyish Pearce is a budding curmudgeon, he is a sympathetic one. Never married, he lives alone, nursing a broken heart, in the Vermont house bequeathed to him by his famous painter father. One evening, a garishly painted VW bus gets stuck on his property. The driver is a pretty, unhinged young woman named Jessica, who claims to have gotten lost on the way to Texas. The lonely Hewitt eagerly offers her a place to stay.
Soon after Jessica’s arrival, Hewitt’s former girlfriend, a prosperous therapist named Emily, loses her physician husband in a car accident. Hewitt, who’s never gotten over his rejection by Emily when they were both young lovers, decides to show up on her doorstep, offering comfort.
At first, Emily sends him away, but when she finds out that her husband was on his way back from a tryst with her sister when he died, she relents. A strange form of courtship, conducted mostly by telephone, ensues between the conflicted but sane and strong-willed Emily and the fragile Hewitt. Meanwhile, Jessica, a woman with a history of mental illness, begins to grow on Hewitt, displaying a wounded soul just like his own. And it turns out that Jessica’s arrival in Hewitt’s life isn’t as random as it first appears.
In its broadest outline, “A Peculiar Grace” is a conventional romantic tale. Two women offer the hero a choice between past and present, between suburban and bohemian, between strong and weak. Lent even makes sunny Emily a blond (“her hair the color of oatstraw”) and stormy Jessica a brunette (“her eyes dark as her hair.”).
But it’s also a tale about the consolations of meaningful work. This is the lesson we draw from the account of Hewitt’s father’s tragic and tormented life, which is told mostly in overheated flashbacks. There’s also a poignant contrast in his son, who’s god-like and happily absorbed when at his forge, and unsure, adrift and easily wounded in the rest of his life.
Lent’s first two books were historical novels. His debut, “In the Fall,” is a work that can stand with Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” as a bold imagining of the legacy of slavery. “In the Fall’s” language is sometimes grand, sometimes thrillingly strange, but always appropriate to its epic subject.
Paradoxically, with the more contemporary story in “A Peculiar Grace,” Lent’s touch is less sure. He burdens this ordinary tale with the weight of too much transcendence. Lent has been compared with Faulkner, and like Faulkner, he is really two writers. The first is a clear observer of rural life and a subtle psychologist. The second can write prose as purple as anything in Prince’s wardrobe:
“Now and then life cracks open like a giant stone to reveal the delicate wisps and webbings that patch together time, sweet fibrous tendrils of the heart’s song and time itself bends and warps to become unrecognizable as even time…”
Yet “A Peculiar Grace” has many virtues. Lent can describe everyday things – a grape harvest, a dirt road – with fresh, vivid language. He’s also good on the inner life of the middle-aged man: “His reveries and regrets, his sudden bursts of energy set against a general feeling of fatigue and winding down.”
But the reader closes the book with the regretful sensation that the novelist, like his main character, is better suited to another age.
John Broening is a Denver-based freelance writer.
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FICTION
A Peculiar Grace
By Jeffrey Lent
$25
