Enon

by Paul Harding (Pseudonym)

In Enon, Harding follows a year in the life of Charlie Crosby as he tries to come to terms with a shattering personal tragedy. Grandson of George Crosby (the protagonist of Tinkers), Charlie inhabits the same dynamic landscape of New England, its seasons mirroring his turbulent emotional odyssey. Along the way, Charlie's encounters are brought to life by his wit, his insights into history, and his yearning to understand the big questions.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Grief, Novels, Literature, Audiobook, Contemporary

238 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2013

About the author

Paul Harding has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2000) and was a 2000–2001 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA. He has published short stories in Shakepainter and The Harvard Review. Paul currently teaches creative writing at Harvard. His first novel, Tinkers, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I made an enormous tactical error in reading reviews by other people on this site prior to writing this one, because I am confronted here by people who didn't like this book because they "wanted something to happen," because "it's too inward looking," because "it's very confusing."

Well: if you are looking for a short novel in which "things happen," in which the central character isn't "too inward looking," and which isn't "confusing," then you should pass this book by and continue your search elsewhere. There are, after all, millions of other books out there, and more coming by the day.

But: if you want a steady handed exploration of profound and heart wrenching grief, written by someone who has thought through details of suffering and heartache unlike anyone before now--if you are looking for writing that will move you and make you think about the fragility of our lives, and how each and every day we spend with the people we love is a treasure beyond price--then I can safely recommend this book to you.

It is clearly not for everyone, though, so be advised.

[Samadrita · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an ominous sign when your trusted, steady flow of empathy tapers off into a reluctant drip while you were making your way around the misfortunes encountered by a fictional parent rendered newly childless. Are you being too coldly practical, perhaps, mentally asking this grief-addled father to pick up the pieces of his heart and kickstart his life like a pre-programmed cyborg? Is your work-tired brain refusing to let you feel an intense pity for this man who resorts to tripping himself up on drugs to have a daily hallucinogenic rendezvous with his dead daughter?

I dearly wish I could nip such nagging doubts in the bud by answering all these questions with a 'no'. But I can't. My feelings for this book are as vague as the state of the protagonist's chaotic inner world post his daughter's demise.

The themes of trauma and tragedy permeate literature of any merit right down to its bones ever so often, that it's hard to come by a new treatment of the same old soul-crushing sadness. While some authors add an outer gloss of dignity and self-restraint to their psychologically broken characters, others deftly interweave unforeseen outwardly manifestations of repressed grief with the ennui of carrying on with the daily routine. And this is where Paul Harding does things differently.

He kills Charlie Crosby's carefully organized world in an instant, shoving him right down the gaping hole of nothing. Charlie has no story to tell anymore, no purpose left in life except giving us prolonged glimpses of the tendrils of darkness that coil around his waking moments threatening to choke him to death. He only pulls us along for this turbulent ride as he traverses the distance between the edge of utter madness and a saner place, between losing himself in the futility of preserving any and every remnant of his daughter's short-lived earthly presence and finding his footing in the treacherous bog of loss. And this is fine really. But what is his justification for pushing away his co-mourner, his wife?

There's only a thin line of difference between grieving for a loved one and internalizing that grief to the point where you begin using it as an anchor keeping you tethered to the reality that was stolen from you, to the extent the sadness which was gnawing away at your insides bit by bit became so fattened on your weaknesses that it pushed out every other thing from your head to make space for itself. And Charlie treads on this thin line barely holding on to his balance, often crossing over into the territory of no-man's land.

"I could not stop myself from stepping over the same dark threshold, night after night, trying to follow her into the country of the dead in order to fetch her back, even though she visited me in dreams and never left my waking thoughts."

I do not claim a kinship with most kinds of life-threatening sadnesses, especially a grief so fatal as the one entailing the loss of a child, not yet anyway. But I have lost a parent at 14. So I hope Paul Harding forgives me for judging Charlie Crosby the way I did.

Maybe I have never felt important enough to accord my grief a higher place over all the other more terrifying griefs - many of them unknown to me - which befall fellow humans and compete for priority every second in this mystifying drama of life. Maybe it's a personal foible to revere the ones who carry the ineffaceable marks of psychological damage, yet muster the courage to wake up every morning and put in their share of effort to keep the world's engines running. Maybe it's a puerile thing to care for tortured, emotionally scarred, righteous heroes like Rust Cohle who find an all-encompassing nihilism to be the answer to the inherent unfairness of life yet battle with that nihilism every moment with hope.

Whatever the actual reasons maybe, I could not sympathize enough with this hapless father's 'magical realist' tendencies to keep his daughter frozen in the amber of his dope-induced daydreams. Even Harding's thoughtfully wrought, ornate sentences chronicling Charlie's memories of the small rural town of Enon, which witnessed the birth and death of his daughter, couldn't help me establish that intense emotional connection I was expecting to form with this story-without-a-story. In some of the narrative's most lucid yet hazy moments, during the course of Charlie's scarily accurate depiction of despair in its rawest form - the terror of waking up from a nightmare where your loved one was constantly slipping away from your grasp - I came close to developing a sense of solidarity with his pain. But then these moments of sporadic brilliance were interspersed with numerous other iterations of similarly-themed moments which gave rise to nothing other than indifference in me.

On occasions like these, I wish I could align my reviewing methods with Jan-Maat, Fionnuala and Steve's who never rate books but simply move on after recording their experiences with it. Because how do you rate a grief-stricken father's lament?
This is why I am trying to believe that the noticeable absence of 2 stars will only underscore my apathy for infinite extrapolations of the aftermath of tragedy, paraphrased again and again until the reader becomes too jaded to care, and not my disregard for mourning as the key resonant theme. Because the latter assumption couldn't be further from the truth.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was blown away by this masterful plumbing of the purgatory of despair. A housepainter in a rural town in Massachusetts loses his 13-year old daughter Kate to a car accident while she was biking. His wife leaves to visit her family and never comes back. Charlie Crosby slowly works his way through his own version of the stages of grief, which felt to me like a timeless heroic quest to solve the riddle of life.

Why would anyone want to accompany this man in this painful journey. I would have to answer that the loss of a loved one is universal and that if we are going to keep flying without our wings melting we could benefit from Harding’s attempt to express an algebra to make sense of it all. The immolation of emotion brings forth an incandescent language to temper the blade of Charlie’s soul. At no point in his experience portrayed did I feel he engaged in what is often negatively labeled as “wallowing in self pity.”

Most people are aware that the stages of grief have been analyzed and mapped (by Kubler-Ross). I think there is a bit of distancing from the illusory comfort of this science. I find myself standing back a bit from someone who has experienced such a loss, looking for their progress through these phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. We think we understand when they seem to get stuck awhile on one stage and hope we can nudge them along toward the healing qualities of the endpoint. But we can never directly experience what they are feeling. That’s what family is for, those fellow humans that are closer to the furnace and who get singed in the process. But, as is common in real life, Charlie’s passage doesn’t conform to neat stages, and his journey is taken alone.

Harding’s scenario dispenses with a drama that includes a significant role of support from family or close friends. We can only wonder why Charlie’s wife disappeared on him. For many people, children can be the glue that holds a weak marriage together, and they often contribute to friends receding in importance. Other books focus on the strain placed upon the grieving person’s circle of friends and family. Jane Hamilton’s “The Map of the World” and Chris Bohjalian’s “Buffalo Soldiers” explored those themes well. This book has the hero go it alone, and in that way it has more in common with the Didion’s memoir “A Year of Magical Thinking”.

Charlie’s “stages” are all over the map and cycle and shuffle among rage, devotional reliving of memories of Kate, the shame of being so helpless or “failure of character”, escape through alcohol and drugs, extreme depersonalization, and interludes of madness. The expression of his love and despair were exquisitely beautiful. They capture life in a way not possible without having your back to the wall. For example, wandering alone in the graveyard at night, Charlie begins to feel he is already in the dead past like the Puritans who settled his town in the 1600s:
The house fell dark. It went cold. Rats ate the apples in the basket and the wheat in the sack. The house became a dark box of wood in a dark clearing and it was best to look at it from the dark trees. Raising the house had been audacious and the blessings it had meant to preserve—to hoard, it seemed in retrospect—had not simply vanished but was blighted, as if inside it did not contain a hearth and a chair and a bed but my cankered heart. Or I carried the blackened house inside myself instead of a heart. The idea of entering the house and walking over the dark threshold and sitting in the dark room, on a dark chair, by the dark hearth, and looking through a window with broken panes, back out at the perimeter of dark trees, seemed like damnation.

But like a line from Leonard Cohen that “even damnation was poisoned by rainbows”, the algebra of grief puts it down as proportional to the love of the lost one on the other side of the equation. They don’t erase each other:
Wasn’t the joy of those thirteen years its own realm, encased now in sorrow but not breached by it? That is what I told myself. The joy of those years had its own integrity, and Kate existed within that.

And the math gets undermined:
I had to attempt to fold hope (H) into the emotional tectonics, too, as subtle and rare as the particle it was, because even if at any given coordinate its value was statistically equal to zero, even if at any given moment it was no more than the return of hope, a single grain of it still contradicts a universe of despair.

As he conjures Kate in his eerie fantasies, as here when simulating fishing in his yard at night, he demonstrate a marvelous creative force of the mind in loss:
Light rimmed up against the horizon behind me and sparkled inside the dark mist. As I beat at the fog-submerged yard and the line sizzled and rolled above my head, and, when I mistimed a cast, the fly snapped like the frayed end of a whip, and I turned a few degrees at a time on the stump, presenting the fly along the circumference of the yard, and the light slowly rose up into the world, and I could see the large, dark roots of the trunk radiating out from below in every direction, it seemed for a moment that I was standing on the hub of a great spoked wheel suspended in a cloud and spinning at breathtaking speed and that the force of my centrifugal casts and centripetal retrievals acting on its axis might just create some kind of torsion where, for a fraction of an instant, I might find myself standing next to my daughter in a wooden rowboat at dawn.

The relatively short book is full of such internal monologues of thought and tortured imagination. The rare human communications and exchanges stand out like the force of gravity after drifting in space. The sense of connectedness to this fictional New England town of Enon is a significant force on Charlie as well, including the human values of self-reliance and of seeing life as a gift. I loved to experience his memories of growing up here and of his grandfather, the clock-maker of Harding’s Pulitzer Prize winning “Tinkers”. Even without much of a plot, the fate of Charlie’s struggle was plenty compelling for me.

This book was provided as an advanced copy by Netgalley and was published Sept. 10, 2013.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't do it on purpose but having read Julian Barnes' Levels of Life right before this, it was as if I had a primer on grief as background for this novel. Enon also reinforced the idea I had from the Julian Barnes book about the use of metaphors as perhaps the only way to describe feelings and emotions.

Harding's descriptions of what his first-person narrator sees go beyond the norm. His character sees into the very core of things, and there are quite a few objects that are symbolic of this. When he sees into the past of his town, I was reminded of Erpenbeck's Visitation.

As expected of the writer of Tinkers, the writing is extraordinary. Though the prose is more straightforward here than with his first novel, there are still long lovely lyrical sentences, especially past page 80 or so. His imagined scenarios are breathtaking. Some of the surreal passages reminded me, believe it or not, of Neil Gaiman; and I imagined Mr. Gaiman's reading this novel thinking, ah, yes, and understanding completely.

Finishing this book has made me want to reread Tinkers.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charlie Crosby was walking in the woods when his adored daughter Kate was hit by a car and killed while bicycling home from the beach. In short order, he suffers an additional loss and Charlie descends into a year-long alcohol- and drug-fueled stupor of grief and anguish.

“I was always restless and ill at ease, running too hot. But Kate gave my life joy. I loved her totally and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters.”

That's it. Not much happens in this novel. No likable characters. Not many characters at all except Kate, who appears in flashbacks and in Charlie's increasingly bizarre hallucinations, and Enon, the small New England town where Charlie grew up and to which he is attached as he has been to little else except his daughter. Charlie wanders the meadows and hills around Enon, spends time at his daughter's grave, and makes occasional forays out to buy or steal drugs. With the exception of the lasagna-bearing woman whose car hit Kate and who is quickly driven off, no friend or neighbor in this little town looks in on Charlie or makes any attempt to help him.

“Enon” is not a conventional novel about overcoming grief with a little help from one's friends. It is a searing, unsparing portrait of one man's despair verging on madness. For the duration of the novel, we are trapped with Charlie inside his head, unable to come to grips with his loss and desolation. Abandon hope, all ye who pick up this book. It's pretty grim stuff but also quite beautiful and hard to put down.

Paul Harding writes with great assurance. He steps right up to the brink of florid and overwrought, just as he did in the Pulitzer-winning “Tinkers.” I tend to be impatient with lengthy description of the natural world and with fever dreams but I never rolled my eyes reading “Tinkers” and “Enon.” There are finely crafted narrative bits, including one in which Charlie as a boy accompanies his grandfather (George Crosby of “Tinkers”) on a house call to an ailing grandfather clock and becomes transfixed by an orrery; and there are several lovely recollections of very ordinary interactions between Charlie and Kate. The resolution, although a bit rushed, is quite moving and satisfying, as the world around him that Charlie has obliterated for a year touches him at last.

Lots of people won't like this book. Some will find it depressing, some will bemoan the lack of plot, some will find the prose over the top and dismiss it as pretentious drivel. Others will praise it to the skies or admire but not love it. That should make for some good discussions and comment threads. I might as well stake out my position: I admired it and liked it a lot.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

What does a man do when the sun goes out of his life, when personal loss undoes his world and his self? He is literally thrown out of his normal existence by grief, living in a demi-monde of past and present, history and pre-history, fact and fairy tale, wishes and lies. Charlie Crosby lives that horror in the pages of Enon and Enon is the New England village where Crosbys have lived for two centuries while the area itself has a four hundred year history of settlement. And Charlie ruminates on so much of this in his despair, his anger, his wistfulness, his dreaming, his virtual fever dream.

This is both a beautiful and difficult book. There are scenes that made me gasp at their beauty and others that were so huge and convoluted and spectacularly weird that I wasn't sure I was reading them correctly. But that was the despairing mind inventing a tolerable world.

There are links to the world of Tinkers throughout this story both through Charlie and the ongoing subject of time and clocks.

The yard seemed timeless, and it struck me that the wind moving
the trees and the grass and the clouds was what usually gave the
sense that time was still moving, that the world was still moving,
that the wind was a mechanism something like a clock. Or the trees
and the clouds were the clock and the wind the power released from
some immense solar springs uncoiling in space. I thought my
grandfather might have liked the idea of a clock made of clouds
and wind. (p 230)

At times I grew slightly impatient with Harding's vocabulary filled with words I've never encountered before. Silly me---I should use this as a learning experience as I did when I was younger. Otherwise, I did like this book very much. It is not a book to be enjoyed; it is too full of despair for joy. But it is a book to be highly appreciated for the way it captures an experience many of us will have, but hopefully not in this form.

Recommended.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing character study on grief. Watching the undoing of a man in the wake of his teen daughters' tragic death as he grapples with this overwhelming loss, Harding puts you in his headspace so acutely. It's not an easy read, by any means, but the precise nature of the prose and how it unspools over the course of Charlie Crosby's narrative is impressive.

I read the first 70 pages two times before moving on because it was that compelling and I wanted to absorb it thoroughly before journeying with Charlie through the stages of his grief. I loved how Harding wove in the past, of Charlie's memories with his grandfather (who is the lead character in Tinkers which I *must* go back and read) as well as with his daughter, Kate. It was all so beautifully real and raw, but felt like emotional whiplash going from the honey-hued memories of his past to the dark and bitter reality of his present.

This book deserves so much more praise than it has. I suppose people dislike it purely for how upsetting it can be at times and perhaps because Charlie makes some pretty stupid choices in the midst of his grief, understandably so; but if you are a reader who values character over cleanliness in the narrative, you might appreciate what Harding has done here.

[Darlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel,Enon written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Paul Harding, is tragic in the purest sense of the word; but out of tragedy often comes redemption and that is truly the case with this story. Charlie Crosby is a man who seems to try hard in life but never seems to really get anywhere. After dropping out of college, Charlie returned to his hometown of Enon.. a small New England town. Charlie marries Susan, a girl from Minnesota whom he met while attending college and they have a daughter named Kate. You get the sense, from the very beginning, that Charlie is completely in awe of and in love with his daughter. She seems to represent to Charlie the one thing in his life that he got right.

Charlie set out from the very beginning of Kate's life to instill in her a sense of the history of their town and their own personal family history. The two went on long walks exploring the town, rode bicycles and when Charlie had insomnia, Kate would often sit up with him watching Red Sox games late into the night. The summer before Kate was to begin high school, tragedy struck and Kate was killed. This story.... Charlie's story and in many ways, Kate's story is one that explores the depths of Charlie's grief and despair and ultimately how he managed to pull himself out of those depths and find some peace of mind and acceptance.

This is a very difficult story to read if you, like me, tend to lose yourself in the emotions of the characters of the books you read. You, as a reader, become a close-up spectator to the complete unraveling of Charlie's life after Kate's death. As soon as the funeral was over, Charlie became so distraught and overcome by his grief that he could not function in any capacity... he could not sleep, eat or go to work. He drank heavily and took prescription pills to try to find a few hours of oblivion and freedom from his overwhelming pain. Susan went back to Minnesota to stay with her family and never returned. Charlie continued on the course he was on.. not eating or bathing ; becoming addicted to the pills and even attempting to steal pills from an old man who was recovering from a surgery.

Although this story was terribly bleak, I loved Mr. Harding's exquisite language. His choice of words made Charlie's grief and despair a palpable thing. Each time I picked up the book to read, Charlie's grief felt like a physical presence.. wrapping me in his utter despair. Ultimately, Charlie reached the very bottom of that despair.... a failed suicide attempt reminiscent of Virginia Woolf... that left him full of disgust and self-loathing. Thinking about his failure at even taking his own life, he recalled words his grandfather had said.... "whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of of my life as a gift." At that thought, Charlie realized that the way he had been living had been dishonoring his daughter's life, but in his bitterness and grief, he thought.... "... but it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent scrambling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc..... or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down, even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating."

In "Enon", Charlie Crosby received the worst possible news a parent can get; and Mr. Harding wrote probably the most realistic and honest description of what that grief looks like and feels like. But he also wrote beautifully of the resilience of the human spirit , which allowed Charlie Crosby, when he reached the depths of his despair, to find within himself a spark of hope.... realizing that in allowing himself to be overcome with his grief , he was dishonoring his daughter. He chose instead to focus on and remember the absolute joy he experienced by her much-too-short life.

Well done, Mr. Harding!

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a heart-wrenching novel about a subject that is a nightmare for parents. The narrator, Charlie Crosby, has lost his teenage daughter in a traffic accident. The reader witnesses a man’s life coming undone from unimaginable grief. Harding’s lyrical style of writing allows his main character to mentally degenerate into insanity. This writing style made it easy to flow with Charlie’s feelings and state of mind. Harding added flashbacks, which provided relief from the overwhelming sadness, yet added to the reader’s empathy of Charlie. What Harding failed to provide was friends. Charlie’s family had 4-5 generations in that town, yet Harding didn’t give one good friend to notice Charlie’s fall. For me, that was a plot error that made the novel difficult to believe. Living in a small town in New England, basically the same area Harding described, I know that there’s a lot of community support for the “Townies” as they are called. The Townies are 4 or more generations strong, and they know each other as family. Harding missed that in his authentication of the novel. Also, Charlie’s wife left him a week after their daughter’s death. She did not try and contact him during the year after the death. That seemed unreasonable to me. Beyond that, his portrayal of smothering anguish is realistic. As a reader, I felt Charlie’s despair. Harding wisely made this a short novel; a reader can stand only so much brokenhearted suffering.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elegant Devastation

Most men in my family make widows of their wives and orphans of their children. I am the exception. My only child, Kate, was struck and killed by a car while riding her bicycle home from the beach one afternoon in September, a year ago. She was thirteen. My wife, Susan, and I separated soon afterward.

An elegant and devastating opening. As prelude to the account of a man almost throwing away his life out of grief for his dead daughter, it is magnificent. But I have two problems with the book that follows. The devastation is sordid and unbearable. And the incongruous elegance with which it is described only makes matters worse.

As you would expect from his Pulitzer Prizewinning debut novel Tinkers, Paul Harding writes beautifully here too. He writes exquisitely, poetically, with conscious craft. But is that necessarily a good thing? The description of the day his daughter died reads like the kind of prose poem a high-school teacher would praise, but a good editor would surely excise. In a dozen lines, we get milkweed and goldenrod, silver and purple rain clouds, dragonflies lifting off the meadow, bumblebees at work on the fading wildflowers, and chickadees weaving around one another in the air. Is this some reverse pathetic fallacy, to set off tragedy with futile irony?

There is a piece of quite effective irony, though, a few pages later, when Charlie Crosby, the father, watches himself watching his wife pack, as though their house were a stage set:

As the audience watches the husband, the actor playing the husband, the actor playing the husband struggling to figure out what to say, as if he strains to author his own lines, as if he is struggling to compose his own words....

Although Harding seems too articulate in his description of a man struggling for words (the paragraph goes on for a full page), I do recognize this shock-induced detachment. The recognition propelled me willingly into the rest of the book, hoping he would do more to justify the contrast between diction and anguish.

But he never really did. And alas, my willingness didn't last. As Charlie turns into a recluse, failing to wash or change his clothes, becoming addicted to alcohol and drugs, it got harder and harder to sympathize with him. He remembers Kate in a series of exquisite essays: about things they had done together, about the history of his family and of the town, dreams, fantasies, and nightmares. Each is beautifully written, but few are believable as the expression of Charlie's state of mind at the time. Of course, they were all written a year later, as the opening paragraph suggests. But they don't sound as though they had been written by Charlie—a college dropout who earns money mowing lawns and painting houses—not even a Charlie cleaned up and sober. This is not the half-crazed grief of a bereaved father, but some overpraised author manufacturing that grief as a framework for his own all-too-precious writing.

[Scott Rhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

...And the award for Most Gut-Wrenchingly, Heart-Breakingly Depressing Novel of the year goes to Paul Harding's novel "Enon".

Less a novel and more of a character study in grief and utter despair, "Enon" is about a man named Charlie Crosby, whose 13-year-old daughter is killed in a car accident, and he and his wife split up soon afterwards. For the remainder of the novel, we are witness to his painful spiral into a rock-bottom suicidal melancholia, as the days tick by into weeks and months and everything loses its color and luster. Eventually, this once hard-working house painter and loving husband and father is sneaking out at nights during insomniac episodes to break into people's houses for drugs and painkillers, as his life crumbles around him.

I'm not going to lie: this book is incredibly difficult to read. As someone who has, in the past, suffered from bouts of depressive episodes (never to this extent, thankfully), I had to put the book down occasionally just to breathe and wipe away the tears. Then there is the issue of the death of his young daughter, an issue that particularly resonates with me now that I have a nine-month-old daughter. Every waking moment, I am spending time with my daughter or wishing that I was spending time with her, and the thought of her just being in the world gives me tremendous joy. The thought of losing her is something that I can't, or won't, even think about. So, yes, this book is an exercise in persistence and going way outside one's comfort zone when reading.

What helps immensely is Harding's beautiful prose and his ability to capture the humanity and universality of grief. He is writing from a place that everyone, at one point in his or her life, has been. At times, the book reads more like a long prose poem or a beautiful eulogy.

I have not read Harding's first novel, "Tinkers", for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, but I will now. It is, hopefully, not as depressing as "Enon", but I don't think that is possible...

[s · Rating 1 out of 5]

Holy run-on sentences, Batman!!

This book was not for me. I found it boring and long-winded. I got really tired of hearing about all the false worlds Charlie built up in his head after his daughter's death. I couldn't even read the book after awhile... I skimmed through huge sections (whenever he started rambling about Kate, which is all he ever did). I was looking for something to *happen*.

I'm not joking about the run-on sentences, either. Reading the Kindle version, a single sentence could span multiple pages. Ugh. This happened continuously.

I don't know why I had I no sympathy for Charlie, but I didn't, which is probably what made the book so unbearable to me. You have to *want* to know about Charlie and his state of mind to read about what is mostly his thoughts (which become more and more twisted and sad as he descends into "decrepitude", as he once put it). I really didn't much care. There was absolutely nothing to relate to. I can't recommend this one.

[KJ Grow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tough book to recommend, though it could very well be the best book of the year. I think this is a better book than Tinkers, and that Paul Harding deserves to win the Pulitzer Prize again for Enon.

This book will gut you, take you into some very dark and terrifying places. At its core, this it a book about grief unraveling a man to the point of near madness. At the same time, this book will dazzle you with exquisite, pure imagery and language, and it will crack open your heart to acknowledge the frailty of the human condition.

Steeped in nature and the lore of a New England village, Enon is about being born into a place, dying in a place, the unstoppable flow of history, and the blessings that enter our lives and fly away from us with no notice.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should preface this review by saying that I have not read Paul Harding's novel Tinkers, a novel that was much praised and even earned him the Pulitzer Prize. Having read Harding's work back to front, then, as it were, I can only offer an opinion on Enon; while others below have situated the new novel in terms of his prior work—and most virtually unanimous in stating the follow-up is far inferior to his previous novel—I can only speak of Enon, and so of Enon I shall speak.

I am led to believe that Enon is an amalgamate New England town that served as the locale for Tinkers, just as it does in Enon; I am also led to believe that Harding has expanded on some of the characterizations and townsfolk in his second novel, focusing on Charles Crosby grandson of the clock repairman protagonist of Tinkers. In this way, one would expect a coherence to exist between the two novels, something akin to Faulkner—to whom Harding appears to be indebted, although his prose is not singular enough to have a style of its own with influences evident or surmised—where the town becomes the major character around which people, families, and lovers enact a kind of mise en abyme, the mirror reflecting outward from the text toward society at large.

Characters, in novels like these, tend toward the caricaturesque or allegorical; the town is the vehicle by which the author examines social and cultural questions, and, most importantly, how these affect the individuals living within them. As Crosby notes in the first-third of Enon:

There are certainly more citizens of Enon beneath its fifty-four hundred acres than there are above it. Just beneath our feet, on the other side of the surface of the earth, there is another, subterranean Enon, which conceals its secret business by conducting it too slowly for its purposes to be observed by the living.

And, since Crosby has just lost his thirteen-year-old daughter, Kate, he locates her in this "subterranean Enon" and positions himself as the storyteller who can uncover the "secret business" of this hidden terrain.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to judge a work based on preconceived notions of genre, or even conservative of me to assume that an author must adhere to the conventions within which his work appears to be operating, as Harding's does here. However, while my own reading tastes are far from the conventional, and while I very much admire authors who can utilize conventions to their own ends, bringing their own voice and style to bear on age-old themes in new ways, I don't feel that Enon offers anything new whatsoever.

There are numerous novels about love; there are numerous novels about death and dying. Should these topics and themes be thrown into the dustbin, rendered moot because they've been written to death? Of course not. These are major experiences that cause us to consider our lives and our interrelation with others; these are philosophical and phenomenological questions to which there will never be any answers.

With that said, if an author does choose to work with such trued-and-true themes, said author must inject something new: this can be by means of style, voice, point-of-view, or something entirely different. To return to Faulkner, whom I mentioned earlier, his examinations of cultural and national guilt, both at the civic level and at the level of intimacy, have been themes touched upon by writers such as Hawthorne, Flaubert, Kafka, James, et al. But Faulkner injects his own personal voice and style: his writing is the subject matter and his subject matter is the convention against which he is writing, making new forms fit older questions, creating new questions out of linguistic and stylistic innovations—run-on sentences and all.

To return to Harding's Enon, a catchy title for a town which, of course, a clever palindrome for "none," the very name itself is overvalued in the Lacanian sense: it requires a deeper interrogation of why this allegorical place is both somewhere and nowhere which never seems to occur. (It also carries with it biblical reverberations and allusions to baptism, again an interesting connection, but one that is not explored here in the depth it deserves, not even in a metaphorical sense.) True, Harding's traumatized and grieving narrator, Crosby, exists in this sort of liminal no-mans-land where life is at the same time something (in his memories of his daughter before her untimely death) and nothing (in his moments of despair, despondency, and drug-induced hallucinatory scenes which he relies upon as a coping mechanism).

Harding wants the town to be both allegorical and real, but he wants his characters to be real, and there is a problem with this, especially in Enon where Crosby's character is not fully fleshed out until toward the middle of the novel. If the reader is expected to empathize with this man who loses his daughter on the first page of the novel, the mishandled and haphazard use of allegory/realism inherent in Harding's structure—let me rephrase, lack of structure—cause the reader to instead loathe a narrator whose "likeability" is the very crux of the novel itself. Harding wants the reader to follow Crosby on his grief-stricken journey; Harding wants the reader to mourn the ephemeral nature of life along with Crosby. Instead, though, what happens is that a distance is erected right from the beginning between town/characters and reader due to the very issues which I have attempted to outline above.

To be sure, Harding's novel is very much in the mode of the memento mori, and many readers are appealed to these sorts of novels so that they might learn something about the dying or grieving process, or else so that they might instead act as a voyeur and watch someone else dying or grieving (the it's-not-me-today argument). It is worth noting that both of these reading perspectives are rooted in narcissism, but this is a drive that Enon rebukes continuously.

I began this novel with high hopes, largely due to the fact that friends of mine on here whose opinions I have long valued rated it highly; however, I think that I have discerned where the problem lies—or, I should say, where my problem lies. A bit of scouring, and it seems that those who rated Enon highly are those who also rated Marilynne Robinson Gilead highly, a novel that I loathed. And why did I loathe Gilead? For exactly the same reasons I have outlined in my review here. Coincidentally, Robinson was also Harding's teacher at Skidmore.

While the genre of the memento mori, albeit stretched in both cases, has existed ad infinitum, neither novel lends anything new. Instead, both are structurally built around a flimsy premise: the dying man remembering everything so that his son can remember him; the living man who remembers his life and his town and his family because his daughter has died so suddenly and so very young. Death is not flimsy, of course, but as a plot conceit it is in both cases: it is merely the vehicle that allows each respective narrator to meander in what attempts to be stream-of-consciousness, as, in "precious" prose they recall their lives, family members, exploits, losses, and so on. As such, death is not the topic while both authors appear to be claiming that it is: it is simply the launching pad.

Bad reviews are often the lengthiest and hardest ones to write, in order to foreground and demonstrate why a novel doesn't work, what is flawed about it, how it fails to deliver, etc. But what is often longer are works like Enon which should have perhaps been relegated to a short story rather than a full-fledged novel. As I began with Faulkner, perhaps it's fitting that I close with him: his brand of stream-of-consciousness is just that, an attempt to suss out how a mind works in relation to external circumstances. Some reviews of Enon below have touched on Harding's apparent use of stream-of-consciousness, but, for this fan of Proust and nearly all the modernists, I failed to see these as anything by run-on sentences—which, to be fair, have their use (the final section of Joyce's Ulysses is the most devastating piece of writing of the last one-hundred-and-fifty years).

But read the following example of Harding's "stream-of-consciousness" (plucked at random, Crosby recalling spending time with Kate while she was alive), and answer for yourself if this indicates a stylistically innovation way of approaching the subject matter or if Harding was merely in need of some rounds of editing with which his publishers failed to provide him:

We'd sit and recline next to each other and the shadows would advance over our heads like a canopy and clouds would spread out over the sky from the west and Kate would braid stalks of grass and I'd watch the sky and point out the evening star and the crescent moon as it arced up from behind the dark firs and the bats would begin fluttering after insects and we'd each take one last sip of the last of the water in the canteen, tepid and metallic, holding some of the day's earlier heat in it, and we'd cool off and rest a little beneath the wide pavilion of night before setting out for home.

Your decision to the above question should, in all truth, let you know straightaway whether Enon is for you or whether it is simply a waste of your time.

[Laysee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enon is a painfully beautiful novel about the depth of a father's love and grief over the loss of his daughter. It is the second novel by Paul Harding whose debut novel, Tinkers, clinched the Putlizer Prize for Fiction in 2010.

Charlie Crosby's 13-year-old daughter, Kate, was killed by a car while riding her bike to the beach. Her sudden death shattered Charlie's world, ended his marriage, and plunged him into a miry bog of despair and self-abandonment. Charlie and his wife had a decent marriage, but it was their daughter who held the tenuous thread of their life together. Charlie reflected, "But Kate gave my life joy. I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smouldering dreams of monsters." The enormity of Charlie's grief and the psychological trauma that unmoored him from himself make this novel very difficult to read.

As in Tinkers, there is a rich lyricism in Harding's prose in Enon. It astounds me how sadness can be so beautifully rendered. We read of Charlie's memories, times he spent with his daughter teaching her to ride a bike, showing her nature trails, and feeding the chickadees in the Enon River sanctuary. Charlie said, "That joy was the measure and source of my grief."

Strangely too, the elegiac beauty of Harding's prose can sometimes alienate the reader. Perhaps, in his effort to capture the tortured state of Charlie's mind, Harding's sentences tended to be overly long, almost rambling, albeit structurally intact.

Enon is not a book for everyone. There is a very high level of introspection that can feel too heavy and unbearable. I kept on reading because I had to find out what became of Charlie. The closing chapters held some of the most touching interactions in the book.

"Enon" means double spring or a place of abundant water. Harding's understanding of the inner workings of grief and empathy are abundant too.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF.

I tried. Really, I did. I thought it might be interesting to watch this tragedy unfold. However, this got way out of hand. I'm fine with hallucinations (being a nerd about psychedelic science), but the hallucinations in this book took up way too much of the time, and Charlie wasn't growing at all in between.

The writing was beautiful in places, but much too flowery in others. Scale it back, Paul Harding, scale it back.

[Evan Leach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 debut novel, Tinkers. In Enon, Harding keeps his focus on the Crosby family that was the subject of Tinkers, but shifts attention down to George Crosby’s grandson and great-granddaughter.

While the central character in Tinkers spends the majority of the novel on his deathbed reminiscing about the past, that still managed to come across as a positive, life-affirming book. Harding is exploring much darker terrain here. It’s no spoiler to say that this is the story of a man dealing with the death of his daughter. Right at the book’s beginning, Charlie learns that his teenage daughter, Kate, has been killed. The rest of the book is an examination of how Charlie processes (or fails to process) this event. The immensity of Charlie’s grief soon threatens to overwhelm him completely, and his behavior grows increasingly more erratic as he finds it more and more difficult to relate to the world around him.

The book that this most reminded me of was actually not another novel, but Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala. Deraniyagala’s memoir is a searing, unalloyed look at her life after losing her children, husband, and parents to a tsunami. The author of Wave was an economist by trade, not a writer, and her clinical, exacting descriptions of her suffering made for a haunting, unforgettable read. Enon examines the same subject matter, but from a different angle. Harding is a gifted prose stylist, and his vivid, lyrical descriptions of Charlie’s agony and the dreamlike scenarios he finds himself in approach the topic of grief from a different, but equally effective, angle. The two books make for interesting companion pieces (although for goodness’ sake, pick up something lighter in between).

At the end of the day, this is a sad book that mostly consists of Charlie’s internal struggle. There is not a lot of dialogue or dramatic action (although there is some very memorable imagery); Charlie spends most of the book either barricaded in his home or wandering the town in solitude. I can see why this book is not particularly widely read, and it’s not a book for everyone. But there is a dark beauty to what Harding has created here, especially for readers with an interest in well-crafted prose. 4.0 stars, recommended!

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved Tinkers but Enon, the sequel, misses the mark.

Enon follows a grieving dad fighting substance addiction after he loses his daughter in a bike accident. The book is written in the 1st person and the writing style is not in sync with the devastation of losing a daughter. There are few people that Charlie interacts with as time moves on, going more than a month without speaking to another person. There are no plot twists in this novel, it was just a little too sad and personal for my liking.

Tinkers by contrast was a historical novel where the narration was at a safe distance. This allowed ample space for the author to beautifully write about the natural elements and history of New England while not seeming to be insensitive to the characters’ hard knock existences.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enon. An abbreviation of a Latin word? A biblical name? Here it is the name of a small town in New England, home of Charlie Crosby. I have not read Tinkers, Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, but Charlie is the grandson of the man who is dying in Tinkers.

The writing is exquisite. It moves along at the pace of a stroll down a country lane, always imbued with a sense of the history layered in the surroundings.

First paragraph:

"Most men in my family make widows of their wives and orphans of their children. I am the exception. My only child, Kate, was struck and killed by a car while riding her bicycle home from the beach one afternoon in September, a year ago. She was thirteen. My wife, Susan, and I separated soon afterward."

I honestly don't know how any parent survives the death of a child, especially a young child who still lives at home. Charlie barely did and this is his grieving story.

Charlie is a reader, a life long reader. Since he was a young kid, he read mysteries and horror stories and books on history and art and science and music. He liked big fat tomes so he could linger in other worlds and in other people's lives. Those big books are the sign of a true reader. "What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I'd never have imagined possible." Exactly!

When Kate dies, Charlie falls apart, completely and utterly. His wife moves back to live with her parents in Minnesota. He met her in college. She was a schoolteacher and he became a guy who took care of people's lawns, just so he could make some money, because he really had no skills or even ambition. His life and all his emotions and energy were invested in Kate. As if he did not have a personality of his own, so lived through her.

Most of the novel is about the unraveling of Charlie. It is gruesome though strangely not without a sort of wry humor. Here and there are some stories about how he met his wife, what their life had been, and about his grandfather George Crosby, a man who repaired clocks. But mostly we go with Charlie as he walks all night long, night after night, in the woods, to the graveyard, around the town. Out of his mind on booze and painkillers and finally hard drugs, he deteriorates before our eyes.

Since Charlie is telling the tale, he must have lived to tell it. Truly though, I was convinced he was going to die. But he doesn't and it appears he was saved by a vision he had when he was just on the edge of passing out as he wandered in the night.

"There is a sound that no human ear can hear, coming from a place no human eye can see, from deeper within the earth but also from deep in the sky and the water and inside the trees and inside the rocks. The sound is a voice, coming from a register so low no human can hear it, but many people throughout the town are disturbed from their sleep by it. It is a note from a song the shape of which is too vast ever to know"

That is Charlie describing what saved him. Or what made him decide to save himself, or at least to go on living. I would not call this novel hopeful or inspiring, at times it was frightfully depressing. What kept me going is that it sounded like truth.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to argue with myself, well who better to argue with, on how to rate this book. A part of me, the part that loves beautiful prose and intense emotion wanted to give this a four, but the part that thought he wandered a little to far afield for my liking, with the main part of the story wanted to give it a three. Well, surprise, surprise I won. But now everyone knows the reason for the three stars.

At the beginning of this book, Charlie's daughter Kate is killed by a car, while crossing the street. This is a story of such searing grief, a man who feels he has nothing left to live for now that his daughter has gone. He is unable to function in any normal way, just goes over and over the places he and his daughter used to go in the town they lived. The prose is powerful, beautiful and vivid. I just wished some of the side trips were not so lengthy. A book that is definitely worth reading, and readers who have more patience than I will love this book. I am glad I read it just to experience the wonderful prose.

[Kas Molenaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hoewel mijn mening gekleurd is door een boekbespreking over dit boek, dit is fantastisch. Lees dit.

[Frabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Quasi tutti gli uomini della mia famiglia lasciano vedove le mogli e orfani i figli. Io sono l’eccezione. La mia unica figlia, Kate, è stata investita e uccisa da un’auto mentre tornava a casa in bici dalla spiaggia, un pomeriggio di settembre di un anno fa. Aveva tredici anni. Mia moglie Susan e io ci siamo separati subito dopo."
Questo l’incipit.
Chi racconta è Charlie Crosby - che è poi il nipote di George Washington Crosby, il protagonista del primo romanzo di Harding, “L’ultimo inverno”. Racconta, Charlie, il dolore atroce per la perdita della figlia, la devastazione - lui vittima eppure anche complice -, le allucinazioni da farmaci e alcol, il deliquio inframmezzato di ricordi, i tentativi di trattenere comunque la sua Kate in qualsivoglia dimensione… Racconta, Charlie, un anno da uomo solo e perduto: fino a un uragano che si sfoga su Enon (cittadina immaginaria del New England) e alla quiete dopo la tempesta.
Paul Harding scrive con molta delicatezza, anche quando i temi sono forti, e rasenta spesso la poesia, spingendosi talora al confine… con l’indescrivibile, la sua prosa potendo allora apparire straordinariamente intensa e ricca, ovvero magari ad altri pretenziosa e barocca: in questo suo secondo romanzo, più ancora che nel primo, io ho trovato Harding - la sua storia, la sua prosa - convincente, toccante, affascinante.

[Jessica J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing ever causes me such consternation as the reluctant three-star rating. I sometimes worry that I give too many but to be fair, three stars is average and by very definition most books are going to be average.

But there are some books out there that I suspect I would enjoy more if I read them in a different time and place, if I were a member of different demographic, if I had different life experiences. In my former life as a bookseller, I tried very hard to remember that customers wouldn't always have the same taste in books as me and sometimes the right recommendation was for a book that I didn't particularly care for.

If I still worked in a bookstore, Enon might be one of those books.

Paul Harding won the Pulitzer in 2010 for Tinkers, a novel that kind of came out of nowhere, about the ruminations of a dying man. I didn't read it, because I'm not one to jump all over award winners and because it just didn't sound like the kind of thing that would resonate with me. Still, I was intrigued when I found his follow-up on NetGalley. Here Charlie, the grandson of the protagonist from Tinkers, must deal with the sudden loss of his thirteen-year-old daughter. Charlie and his wife have predictably divergent grieving processes and so it comes as no surprise that she moves back to her parents' home in Minnesota, leaving Charlie alone in Maine, a man without a family.

He doesn't handle it all that well.

This book is sad as hell, but you know that going in. And it means there's some lovely writing these brief pages but Harding doesn't let it cross into emotionally manipulative territory. And yet -- there's nothing particularly new here. It's all territory that's been well-worn by many other writers and Harding just doesn't offer anything fresh. I felt like there was a superlative novel bubbling underneath the surface, but Harding didn't quite push it through. At the same time, I don't doubt that there is an audience that will be able to more fully relate to Charlie and will find that this book resonates.

[Darryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Charlie Crosby lives in a ramshackle house in the small New England town of Enon, along with his wife, Susan, and his strong-willed 13 year old daughter, Kate, who he respects and adores immensely even though he shares none of her positive traits. He dropped out of college soon after Susan became pregnant while they were students, and his meager income as a house painter supplements the money she earns as a teacher. His relationship with Kate is far stronger than the one he shares with his wife, who tolerates his idiosyncrasies and failures for the sake of their daughter.

Charlie's world comes crashing down on an August evening, when Kate is killed by a motorist while riding her bicycle. While Susan tries to cope with her grief and look ahead, Charlie is caught in a web of morbid anguish and self pity. Unable to deal with her emotional and physical invalid of a husband, Susan returns to her family in Minnesota, leaving Charlie alone with his ennui and angst.

The novel jumps back and forth to events of Charlie's childhood and adult life, interspersed with his memories of Kate. His life slowly unravels, as he stops working and succumbs to a deep psychological torpor while he isolates himself from his neighbors and wallows in self pity.

Enon was a disjointed patchwork of a book, with unrelated fragments set next to one another like the pieces of a puzzle that have just been dumped onto a table. The snapshots were occasionally interesting in themselves, but the lack of a unified plot and Charlie's unlikable, navel-gazing character made this a tedious and largely unenjoyable read.

[Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just because he won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book "Tinkers," I guess Paul Harding's editors couldn't bear to tell him his second novel didn't work.
The story is about a guy named Charlie Crosby, (grandson of the narrator in Tinkers) whose 13 year-old daughter is killed on her bicycle and his wife leaves him. That's about all the plot there is. The rest of the book is Charlie wandering around, having fantasies about his daughter, slowly falling into a pit of self-abuse (drugs) and self-pity. Yuck!
Reading this just after my writing coach told me that a series of events does not a novel make, it was a perfect illustration of what not to do.
The language is eloquent and lovely, but it's still not a novel.
I picked it up initially with great expectations, putting it down after I saw it was about grief for the death of a child. I always have trouble with this subject matter, but I thought maybe there was something redeeming about it. So I picked it up again and read more (it's a short book). Nope. Nothing more interesting than more grief, more hallucinations, more drugs.
There is one small part near the end (minor spoiler) where Charlie seems to see something vague that he describes it only as "a sound no human ear can hear".
And what happened to Charlie's wife?
Several reviewers said it was a good description of grief, but, again, that's not a novel. I want to read something that will inspire me, make me laugh, give me hope. Life is too short to read stuff like this, even if it's a short book.

[Barb H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harding has an amazingly broad talent for details. One can easily observe the scenes which surround his characters, whether they are of interior design or of nature's environs. Enon is the incredibly sad tale of a father's love and loss. This man's descent into hopeless grief and his subsequent deterioration are painfully spelled out in these pages. Of interest is the title of this, which of course spells "None" backwards- interesting metaphor.

I find a need to compare Harding's book, Tinkers here. His elegant descriptive passages are ever-present. We revisit the intricate workings of clocks and time with references to the characters of that tale who are also participants in this story. I did not feel the previous allure as with his earlier book,however, because I found that he tended to ramble on well after I observed the dire, joyless situation which had evolved. I felt my interest could not be sustained through the heavily laden symbolism here. It became exhausting for me, so perhaps Harding had achieved his goal of involving the reader in these bleak events.

I will continue to seek Harding's unique writing, but I do not think this novel matched the quiet brilliance of Tinkers .

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer. Just because I 5-star this book doesn't mean you will thank me for the recommendation and find as much to love as I did. It just seemed to speak to my personal reading preferences, so see if you have any matches before you rush out and buy the book.

First, on page one, sentence three, you learn that the protagonist, Charlie Crosby, loses his 13-year-old daughter Kate in a bike accident. Within a few dozen pages, he loses his wife, too, as she flees to her family back in Minnesota (the setting here is the north shore of greater Boston).

Does this mean I am into really depressing books of loss, ones where the character spirals out of control in a maelstrom of prescription drugs, liquor, and cigarettes? Not hardly. But I did like the writing. And I like how Harding used the situation to play to his strengths.

Meaning: He appears to be a man who likes to be alone, who understands being alone, and who contemplates nature at great depth while he is alone. This book's depressing conceit allows him to exploit these strengths. Back and forth Charlie's mind goes -- from flashbacks to his own childhood to flashbacks to daughter Kate's. He was especially close to his only daughter. Having and losing an only increases the impact. It's devastating, and almost as if he appreciates his wife's leaving so he can wallow in the devastation all the more.

As you might expect, in between the fogs (OK, even during them, eventually), Charlie haunts his daughter's grave a lot. In one such scene, you get writing like this:

"I rose and convulsed from the cold and retched from the poison. I looked over at the snow-covered golf course, where kids sledded every winter, and imagined the dead having sledding parties at midnight, on the back slope of the hill, warming their finger bones in blue fires that they kindled in granite urns, laughing when they held their hands inside the flames. I imagined them melting clumps of dirty ice in a tin bucket over the fire and drinking the hot muddy brew and cackling with glee as it ran off the backs of their jawbones and spattered down their ribs. I imagined them using headstones for sleds. The idea made me nauseated and I repented of it. I had the urge to go to Kate's stone and kneel in front of it and say, I'm sorry, over and over again, because no matter how much I knew better, I could not stop myself from stepping over the same dark threshold, night after night, trying to follow her into the country of the dead in order to fetch her back, even though she visited me in dreams and never left my waking thoughts."

Nice, no? So if you can luxuriate in the words despite the sadness, if you can avoid the temptation to judge Charlie as being a selfish loser who should know better, and if you appreciate the special emotions that are part of the state of being alone, you might feel as rewarded as I did by this book. Is the best book I've read in years? No. Not THAT kind of a five-star reading. But good. If you like writer's writers. Hope the caveats help!

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of Enon from The LibraryThing through the Early Reviewers program and let me start off by saying that I could not put this book down. The writing is exquisite. Paul Harding takes the reader on a roller coaster of feelings, from sadness at witnessing the tragic loss of the main character's only child, through sympathy at Charlie's attempts to lash out and cope with the crushing blow, to finally, almost embarrassment at how low he sank in the midst of his grief.



In the beginning of the novel, the glimpses we see into Charlie's life prior to the tragedy revolved around the immeasurable love for his only child, 13 year-old Kate. It seemed like almost every sentence had some kind of a reference to the girl, which had a heartwarming effect. Even his marriage seemed to be held together only by the fact that there was a child involved. Therefore, it's all the more heart wrenching, when the one thing he truly cared about is so brutally taken away. Charlie spirals into a year long despair, abundant in drugs and alcohol, during which he nearly drives himself to the brink of insanity.


The only negative thing I have to say about the entire book, is that while some descriptions of Charlie's nightmares and hallucinations are overly drawn out, the part that I considered to be the climax of the story, where he attempts a suicide and afterwards finally pulls himself together, is wrapped up in a span of a few pages. Other than that little side note, I thought the book was great, and I would like to thank LibraryThing once again for giving me the opportunity to read and review it.

[Jennifer Stephens · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paul Harding, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers has written a new novel titled Enon. It hits bookstores in early September, but interested readers can pre-order the book now at Amazon.com.

While rich in its prose, Enon is one of the most depressing books I've ever read. Our protagonist, Charlie Crosby, looses his daughter in a terrible accident and it causes his entire life to unravel. For some there is a voyeuristic pleasure in observing, from a safe distance, the depravity of a lost soul and novels (like this) and movies (I point you to American Beauty) that feed this appetite satisfy. For others, watching hurt and damaged people wrestle with demons to no avail in an agonizing dance that continues long after the music stops is painful and horrifying. I am in the latter grouping and so this book is not for me. Not for me at all. In short: do you find enjoyment in reading about drug addiction, overwhelming penetrative grief, isolation, and despair? In turning page after page to find the misery and sorrow just go on and on? Then this book is for you. Otherwise, not so much.

Also, a mild criticism of the voice that is given to Charlie: he is painted as an everyday blue collar handyman by trade, presumed to be lacking a college education, and yet his inner dialogue is quite intellectual. Works as a grunt, but thinks like a scholar? This seems contradictory.

[Celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much better than its predecessor, Tinkers. This is the story of Charlie Crosby, the grandson of George Crosby, the protagagonist of Tinkers.

Charlie and his wife Sue have a daughter named Kate. Early on in the book, Kate is hit by a motorist while riding her bicycle and dies.

Charlie is devastated and his marriage is negatively affected too. Here, in Enon, Harding follows a year in the life of Charlie Crosby as he tries to come to terms with these shattering personal tragedies.

"A stunning mosaic of human experience, Enon affirms Paul Harding as one of the most gifted and profound writers of his generation."

The story is very sad, though, as Charlie spirals into addiction. My husband keeps asking why I read such tragic stories. I say "Because they are written well".

4.5 stars