A Window on the Door

by James Watson

"Tense, poetic, and heart-stopping." -Kirkus Reviews

A glacially suspenseful novel of memory and desire, violence and forgiveness, set against the backdrop of the Texas hill country. Told in a prose by turns luxuriant and brutal, Watson's gripping debut interweaves the story of quiet, wayward high school senior Jonathan, with that of a priest who long ago lost his only son.

Profound, searing, and funny, Kirkus Reviews has called A Window on the Door "gut-wrenching and nearly addictive, as if the reader couldn’t possibly take another bite and yet still craves more," and author James Watson "a subtle and yet masterly writer."

"A quiet, beautiful, stunning book. Unforgettable characters and prose that will make you weep." -Luke T. Harrington, author of Ophelia Alive.

Author's Note: 50% of the net revenue from all sales of this book [new copies, at any rate] will be given to the care of orphans, widows, those fleeing war, and others in need. Thank you.

Genres: Fiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2015

About the author

James Watson lives in the shadow of a misty hill, with one saint, five boys, and a preternaturally intuitive cat. A Window on the Door is his first novel.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully crafted book, both physically and in story. What I loved about this book is that it made me Feel. I was deeply engaged with the characters throughout, and the realness of the story kept me turning pages. Heartbreaking, challenging, uplifting. A dance. A journey. An adventure. Window was so compelling because it is the tick-tock of human experience.

[Luke Harrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quiet, beautiful, stunning book. Unforgettable characters and prose that will make you weep.

[Ross Lile · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Jonathan suffered little of the normal hazing that is the lot of new roustabouts and mud hands, being placeable on no ladder and therefore on no man's bottom rung."

James Watson 's writing approach had me engaged at the start. Making complex emotion simple and landscape emotional. Reminded me of the way classic American literature can make you feel something real and tangible for a place you've never been and people you've never met. James Watson set the stage well. Before a page turn almost 100 pages into A Window on the Door I was pleasantly hoodwinked by the line above. In an instant my brain pivoted from prose to what felt more like a reflex of poetry. I was hooked and wanted more.

This story feels real. It's just my opinion, but there is a certain enjoyment and comfort in that because of the promotion of farce realities our culture is immersed in these days. life is complex and at times tragic, but it's also very, very good and I was reminded of that in A Window on the Door. Five big stars. As this is the author's first novel, I hope and look forward to what comes next.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly engaging and deeply thought-provoking. The reader is drawn inexorably forward through the disparate yet parallel lives Watson explores. He provides flawed but beautiful and relatable protagonists that we learn to care deeply about, constantly needing to know what comes next and never being sure what they will do or what the outcome of their story will be, indeed until the very end. Watson effortlessly conjures scenes and characters with minimal description, relying instead on turns of phrase, evocative language, authentic dialogue, and the steady building of a picture (really multiple pictures) as the book advances onward. At the end one is left not with an easy "meaning" but with deep-running expressions of what love, forgiveness, life, and even God could, should, do, look like. Watson's moral and spiritual universe is nuanced, sophisticated, rich, and above all incarnated in people the feel very honest and real. This is a book that will stay with me for a long while.

My few quibbles: Watson dispenses with quotation marks for marking out dialogue. This lends a certain almost stream-of-consciousness feel to the book, but more than occasionally requires backing up a line or two (or more) to sort out who is saying what, including whether it is the narrator or one of the characters talking. Also the book (as seems unfortunately more and more common) could have used an additional proofreading pass. Several missing or incorrect words mar the experience. This is exacerbated by Watson's writing style, so that at times the reader is unsure if a word really is missing or incorrect, which only draws even more attention to the proof-reading issues.

This is not my usual kind of book, and it did take a little while to really get going for me, but in the end I am deeply impressed and highly recommend it.

[D. Prokop · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried. I really tried. Like I always do with Southern Gothic authors. Walker Percy, Flannery O' Connor, Faulkner. Their novels contain profound beautiful treasures hiding inside dump heaps. They force the reader to work. But with all my work hard in real life trying to make sense out of grace and redemption, I'm tired. And already suspicious of it's futility. Isn't all futility, mere human? In my fictional lives, I am in need of more than a window of hope in a maze of freeform scribbles. Unfortunately, my literary mind requires a simpler path and a format less avant-garde. I tried, though. I did. And discovered bits of true beauty amid the chaos.I only wish the hunt hadn't been so taxing.

I ordered the book after reading an interview with the author on CAPC, which I admire. The book came to me specially wrapped and beautifully autographed, with all the sincerity of the author, James Watson, entwined. I appreciated his efforts, not only to own his bleeding words, but to keep Southern Gothic writing alive. This Yankee, more of a Madeleine L'Engle fan than a Walker Percy afficiando, understand that it's me, not you.

[Andrew Haupt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should confess at the outset that James Watson lives down the street from me in the hills outside Eugene. He passes my house on his motorcycle and honks when he sees me working in the garden. A Renaissance man, he can wire up your barn, install a septic system, mix a great old-fashioned, and has impeccable handwriting. He's also reluctant to talk about his writing, so I'll have to do it for him. James is a hell of a writer, and his novel A Window on the Door is a hell of a book.

The influence of Cormac McCarthy runs deep — he teaches college courses on him. Similar to when I read McCarthy, I picture Watson’s narrator as a weathered old Clint Eastwood watching the world from a lawn chair, rough-hewn but unable to conceal an unmistakable love of creation that frequently bleeds through. There are a number of passages of striking beauty that make you think, My God should I move to Texas? Did he lift that from Suttree? Is my thesaurus working?

Those hot southern nights in summer under the stars—magic. How many boys and girls running through fields of grown wheat have lain down looking up at the black phosphorescent wrinkle and thought that here, of all places, adults can't see us, and everything is still possible? How many lovers, boots on or off, have made of a truck bed some eternal tryst, ratified by the risen scorpius? Air electric, and the fairies come out. Gunpowder, too, and stump liquor and sweet things. Everything honeyed or acrid stirred up in the blood, and the cicadas singing in chorus over it all the insistent bellows workers of the hex, while just down the way some threesome hoary hobo wizards huddled round a fire smother the flames with a blanket and release it with a chivalric hurrazaband to signal Life billowing up mauve in the glow of the distant silo town and moon sliver. Nothing sleeps in the pastures and all creatures together sing the incessant night.

I still don't know what a chivalric hurrazaband is, but I sure do like the way it makes me feel.

A Window on the Door blends McCarthy's gunpowder and stump liquor with Graham Greene's knack for finding the sacred in the profane. Like Greene's whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, Watson's Father Donald is flawed, messy, and human. A former mechanic who killed the mob boss responsible for his young son's death, he takes confessions at the corner booth of a dive bar and visits his child's actual murderer in prison as penance. Through Donald's struggle, the novel poses its central questions: Is it possible to forgive a person who does the worst thing imaginable to you? Does God demand it?

In another parallel to McCarthy, the southwestern landscape rises from mere backdrop to become a mythic presence, shaping the young protagonist Jonathan's journey after he gets it in his head to leave Portland and work on an oil rig in small town Texas. Instead, he finds himself waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant and raising a garden in a vacant lot outside his budget motel during a historic drought. In Jonathan, Watson captures (with uncomfortable precision) a particular type of coming-of-age: the idealistic teenager with both excessive romantic and ascetic tendencies.

He turned south and came to Ventana. A dusty bright sounding place. Latin but dispassionate, like an infinity pool he had once seen in a National Geographic Traveler magazine. A direct encounter with the globe. The horizon. It meant to him men, real men of diluted Spanish ancestry, who quietly laid away pesos or dollars for decades to provide for their unknowing families. Who died instead at thirty six years old fighting with a broken bottle someone who turned out at the last to carry a small revolver and pressed it into his ribs. Bang bang through a lung. Gasping in an alley of San Antonio, where Cortes rode gleaming awfully against the sun. Dying alone in a dusty alley at three in the morning.

This is a character that many young men searching for meaning in the absurdity and sterility of the modern world will recognize. But Jonathan isn't content to listen to Huberman podcasts, cold plunge, and get jacked — his search leads him to increasingly dramatic and life-derailing acts that inevitably collapse under their own weight. It's through their collapse that he discovers what Simone Weil understood: "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."

It's through these small acts of attention that Jonathan's character emerges — his careful service at a mediocre restaurant, his dogged tending of a futile garden in drought conditions, his patient mending of neighborhood kids' bikes, his meticulous study of how to work on a motorcycle. And while McCarthy (although I love him) can veer into nihilistic territory, Watson finds a different path through the darkness, ultimately invoking Julian of Norwich (and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well) as Father Donald passes through his final crucible.

In addition to McCarthy and Greene, there's another echo here that's hard to miss. The novel shares an unmistakable kinship with Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in how attention itself becomes a form of devotion — the admixture of effort, process, and working with the hands from which emerges the property that Pirsig calls quality, that the Greeks called areté, and which Watson is content to leave nebulous. Maybe there’s something about motorcycles in particular that draws this out in people. Since my wife has made it clear that I'm not allowed to get one, I will have to seek that elusive quality through my perpetually breaking-down riding mower instead.

[Jeremy]

Review (Kirkus Reviews) here. CAPC conversation here.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is hard to put down to say the least. The writing style takes some getting used to, and the lack of quotation marks lost me a couple times. Otherwise, I became invested in each character's storyline almost instantly and was very pleased with this small press, local read.

[Stephen Andes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.

This book is part coming-of-age story and part tale of dealing with the past. It’s rich in language, heart, and setting. Watson taps into the acute condition of what it means to be human. Can’t recommend enough.