A PECULIAR GRACE
By Jeffrey Lent
Atlantic Monthly,
395 pages, $31.50
More Arts Stories
Hewitt Pearce, a hippie blacksmith living in rural Vermont, is "not the man to take on someone else's problems." Laconic and lonely, he's spent years watching scar tissue form over his own, fairly typical wounds: bereavement, bad choices, lost love.
And yet, over the course of Jeffrey Lent's lovely, eccentric third novel, other people's troubles get dumped on Hewitt's porch like so many cords of split rock maple. Most of them are in feminine form, which this gruff sensualist doesn't mind a bit. "How easy to forget how cold we are alone," he thinks, tentatively hugging Jessica, the careworn young drifter he's found stranded in the woods outside his farmhouse.
His relationship with Jessica slaloms (somewhat creepily, I think) between the paternal and the carnal, but it's consistently suspenseful. Where, the reader wonders, will it go? Matters become further complicated with the entrance of Emily, a recently widowed psychologist who was Hewitt's first great love. The poor guy has kept her picture on his bedside table for 20 years, a fact that might sit pathetically on anyone but Hewitt, a backwoods romantic reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man.
Hewitt is, in fact, wonderful company, a decent man riven by past sins linked to weed and alcohol. Living in the shadow of his late father, a famous painter, he has given himself over to the backbreaking rhythms of daily toil: metalwork, gardening, hauling stones and splitting wood. Jeffrey Lent might well be the poet laureate of grunt work; given the meticulous attention he pays them, chores are not so much obstacles to the life well lived as they are that life itself.
Lost as he is in work, though, unhappiness shrouds Hewitt like a thin but certain membrane. One only has to read the sign outside his metal forge: Your Commission is Not My Vision. Nurturing friendships with the well-drawn locals (including a sexy sculptress, Pete the Cop and a crusty Vietnam vet named Walter) do not sustain him completely. No, only true love will do it for Hewitt.
A lover is, of course, in the grip of a psychosis pleasing only to him and one other, so Lent takes great risks in assuming the reader will bear with his occasionally rapturous language. ("Hewitt all liquid neon sparking and feeling those ten thousand trailing enraptured threads between them.") His writing is often invaded by emotions that force it beyond the bounds of stylistic convention, but the risk pays off because it makes sense; after all, nobody thinks of periods and commas in the back seat at the drive-in.
Lent's style grows on you - think of Faulkner with a sinsemilla buzz - but it will not be for all tastes. Check out this particular anaconda: "And maybe it's just a random ball of mud and rock and water but for better or worse the old earth is all we really have for sure and even if it's an illusion, a fracture between what's truly out there and what our eyes see and our brains believe - well there's nothing I can do about that but I do know one day I'll go back into the earth and whatever was me, the me that thinks and feels and cries and hurts and smiles, well that me will either..." Okay already, dude! Don't bogart the conversation. And the book's final pages do lay it on a bit thick, as in a bad movie where shots of fireworks are interspersed with others of furious sheet-thrashing. By this time, the book's many other virtues have ensnared you, though.
The backdrop itself is inescapably romantic. One interesting thing about A Peculiar Grace is that it's a Vermont novel set - perversely, it seems - in summer and not autumn. This off-season trip is a good bargain, however, with the state's Green Mountains, its flora and lakes, its stone quarries and dormant sugar shacks all substituting nicely for the much-vaunted fall foliage. Lent clearly loves his setting (not surprisingly, it's where he's from), with its rich, unpretentious cultural scene and quiet cast of country folk eking out their portion under the sun. The book is as much travelogue as love story, a lure to "flatlanders" everywhere.
Jeffrey Lent is an honest writer, one brave enough to offer up a man's soul stripped of anything that might protect it. "You've never left me, Emily," Hewitt confesses at one point to bachelorette number two. "I don't believe I ever had a choice in the matter but if I did it was when I met you. ... I live by passion." So, evidently, does Lent, a passionate novelist whose graceful peculiarity only makes his work all the richer.
Cynthia Macdonald is a Toronto writer and amateur singer whose rendition of Moonlight in Vermont has no equal.
8