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Native Child
When Oscar Allen, eight year-old Manhattan foundling, ward of the state and child of the streets, and Lillian Hanover, a newly-married Nebraska farm girl still mourning her own parents, are brought together by circumstance in the fall of 1922, they form a bond that neither could have imagined and neither will ever regret.
NATIVE CHILD is the story of an unlikely family: one of the very last of 200,000 “orphan train” riders, sent west from New York by the Children’s Aid Society at his own request, and the young couple from the small town of Spring Valley, Nebraska who impulsively take him in.
Oscar’s reasons for fleeing his native city are just as obscure as Lem’s and Lillian’s for opening their home to him—no cause for concern at first, but as the three grow in mutual understanding, what remains unsaid endangers their new intimacy. Ultimately only further accidents of fate and the deep, irrevocable commitment a young boy and young woman insist on making to each other can break the silence and persuade Oscar to reclaim his voice.
NATIVE CHILD is the story of an unlikely family: one of the very last of 200,000 “orphan train” riders, sent west from New York by the Children’s Aid Society at his own request, and the young couple from the small town of Spring Valley, Nebraska who impulsively take him in.
Oscar’s reasons for fleeing his native city are just as obscure as Lem’s and Lillian’s for opening their home to him—no cause for concern at first, but as the three grow in mutual understanding, what remains unsaid endangers their new intimacy. Ultimately only further accidents of fate and the deep, irrevocable commitment a young boy and young woman insist on making to each other can break the silence and persuade Oscar to reclaim his voice.
150 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 29, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 9, 2016
In this world where books are heavily marketed and forced into genres to be spoon fed to the masses (and of course, you, dear reader) what is better than a book that is trying to shake something real out of us, to squeeze some actual and almost tangible reaction out of the ether by casting a spell of words?
Old magic, and not the kind that works easily in these sudden, quick flicking visual days of meme and tweet, big screen or small. Now it is about the next big thing, what's trending. There is little room for the digestion of emotional reality and formulation of lesson. Wisdom has become something we ingest pre-condensed, like an espresso, rather than a process of distillation that we participate in.
I recommend R.C. Binstock to you because he is a writer still working with that old magic. There is an emotional immediacy in his writing that is empathy and not voyeurism. He engages your understanding, makes you relate yourself directly to the dilemmas his characters face, and not just with the easy things -- thrill, fear, romance -- but with the murkier things: aging, fondness, grief, hero worship, shame. He brings immediacy with a turn of phrase, a single sentence -- it is a rare skill, and not one to be missed if you look for anything other than entertainment in your novels.
Binstock is not always an easy novelist, but reading him is rewarding. Preferring to make you work, this story comes from several different narrators, and from all over the time line, with few clues as to who is speaking or from when. Sometimes I read several paragraphs before synching the voice with the correct character. This can be frustrating, but it keeps you awake as a reader, searching for clues in the words. Binstock's emotional truths can be delivered with force, which at times can be brutal, and with an honesty that is unusually blunt. This is true of some of his earlier books as well, in particular his virtuoso first novel, Tree of Heaven, which did not shy away from the painful, unshaded glare of a love story set in the midst of a war atrocity. Painful, even agonizing, but extremely beautiful as well.
We often take the idea of beauty and compartmentalize it, shape it's natural attributes, like a show poodle. And so we have saccharine, processed things that represent beauty without actually being the whole package -- no storm before the clear air, no final heave before the rest. Beauty is a natural part of life's flow, but it does not exist without the counterpart, the pain, the struggle, the complicated, dirty mess of living, the whole goddam enchilada.The beauty here is earned.
The tone of Native Child is really quite intimate. Binstock is at his best explaining the small buried truths, ferreting them out from their well worn holes in our past. There is not the epic, orating quality of old school Fiction, but there is a persistence of story, a demand to keep reading, and a depth that have been missing in many newer novels. RC Binstock will not disappoint -- I encourage anyone to fall under his spell.
Old magic, and not the kind that works easily in these sudden, quick flicking visual days of meme and tweet, big screen or small. Now it is about the next big thing, what's trending. There is little room for the digestion of emotional reality and formulation of lesson. Wisdom has become something we ingest pre-condensed, like an espresso, rather than a process of distillation that we participate in.
I recommend R.C. Binstock to you because he is a writer still working with that old magic. There is an emotional immediacy in his writing that is empathy and not voyeurism. He engages your understanding, makes you relate yourself directly to the dilemmas his characters face, and not just with the easy things -- thrill, fear, romance -- but with the murkier things: aging, fondness, grief, hero worship, shame. He brings immediacy with a turn of phrase, a single sentence -- it is a rare skill, and not one to be missed if you look for anything other than entertainment in your novels.
Binstock is not always an easy novelist, but reading him is rewarding. Preferring to make you work, this story comes from several different narrators, and from all over the time line, with few clues as to who is speaking or from when. Sometimes I read several paragraphs before synching the voice with the correct character. This can be frustrating, but it keeps you awake as a reader, searching for clues in the words. Binstock's emotional truths can be delivered with force, which at times can be brutal, and with an honesty that is unusually blunt. This is true of some of his earlier books as well, in particular his virtuoso first novel, Tree of Heaven, which did not shy away from the painful, unshaded glare of a love story set in the midst of a war atrocity. Painful, even agonizing, but extremely beautiful as well.
We often take the idea of beauty and compartmentalize it, shape it's natural attributes, like a show poodle. And so we have saccharine, processed things that represent beauty without actually being the whole package -- no storm before the clear air, no final heave before the rest. Beauty is a natural part of life's flow, but it does not exist without the counterpart, the pain, the struggle, the complicated, dirty mess of living, the whole goddam enchilada.The beauty here is earned.
The tone of Native Child is really quite intimate. Binstock is at his best explaining the small buried truths, ferreting them out from their well worn holes in our past. There is not the epic, orating quality of old school Fiction, but there is a persistence of story, a demand to keep reading, and a depth that have been missing in many newer novels. RC Binstock will not disappoint -- I encourage anyone to fall under his spell.
June 27, 2016
Following the dynamic and memorable Swift River, R.C. Binstock once again demonstrates his gift for capturing little-known and little-explored episodes from America’s past: in Native Child he considers the Orphan Trains, a scheme by reform-minded East Coasters to move purported orphans and street urchins to a “more wholesome” life with families in the Midwest. Along the way he manages an unforgettable and unique family saga, filling it with eloquence, and a deep understanding of human impulse and folly. Native Child is touching, impressive, vivid, and full of soul.
An infant, named Oscar by hospital workers, is found in a grocery in New York, becomes a ward of the state until, aged eight years, he runs away from the latest orphanage and falls in with a street gang. Later that year, 1922, he voluntarily gets on a train with dozens of other children and alights in Nebraska. From there, Mr. Binstock unfolds the multi-generational story, with its loves and pitfalls, its challenges and misunderstandings - those things which make family family.
But there are several unique features to Native Child that separate it from so many other family sagas. Oscar, warily trying to find his life in this alien land, finds speech too challenging and too perilous, and so stops speaking. Oscar's reticence can stand in for the thousands of other silenced children extirpated from their lives, but I prefer to judge it in the personal, singular effects it has on Oscar and his adoptive family. It’s a distillation of the many instances of failed communication between and among members of these linked families, most tragically between Oscar’s guardian Lillian and her sister Frances.
But the soul of Native Child, the compelling reason to take it up and delight in it: it boasts an eloquence not often found in today’s resolutely workmanlike fictions. As timeless truths occur to the life-weary and regretful characters, you get passages like this:
Those are Oscar’s words from late in his life, and from Lillian, his beloved adoptive guardian:
It’s the silences within families, between foundlings and those who would improve them, between generations, that drive this terrific novel, and also swallow up the love and devotion that people have for one another. Definitely take up Native Child. R.C. Binstock’s already distinguished contributions have grown yet again.
An infant, named Oscar by hospital workers, is found in a grocery in New York, becomes a ward of the state until, aged eight years, he runs away from the latest orphanage and falls in with a street gang. Later that year, 1922, he voluntarily gets on a train with dozens of other children and alights in Nebraska. From there, Mr. Binstock unfolds the multi-generational story, with its loves and pitfalls, its challenges and misunderstandings - those things which make family family.
But there are several unique features to Native Child that separate it from so many other family sagas. Oscar, warily trying to find his life in this alien land, finds speech too challenging and too perilous, and so stops speaking. Oscar's reticence can stand in for the thousands of other silenced children extirpated from their lives, but I prefer to judge it in the personal, singular effects it has on Oscar and his adoptive family. It’s a distillation of the many instances of failed communication between and among members of these linked families, most tragically between Oscar’s guardian Lillian and her sister Frances.
But the soul of Native Child, the compelling reason to take it up and delight in it: it boasts an eloquence not often found in today’s resolutely workmanlike fictions. As timeless truths occur to the life-weary and regretful characters, you get passages like this:
“The meter of life: not time as we guess, as we mostly suppose, yes time passes and it passes, untiringly, profoundly, but only because you are. The difference in you: between inhale and exhale, between heartbeat and beat, between what you drink at eight and what you expel at ten, the same moisture in and out, passing through you, its atoms unchanged but you are changed and that’s how you know time has passed. How you perceive you are alive, must be alive, must accept the rhythm’s rule.”
Those are Oscar’s words from late in his life, and from Lillian, his beloved adoptive guardian:
“… I was startled to recall how we’d all acted as if Oscar’s silence, his refusal to speak, was something provocative, bizarre. We all refuse words, all the time! We do it selectively, is all, under the pretense of being willing when need arises but that’s a lie. We keep to ourselves what we keep to ourselves without review, [and] without approval … Silence is golden or it isn’t, but it’s widespread.”
It’s the silences within families, between foundlings and those who would improve them, between generations, that drive this terrific novel, and also swallow up the love and devotion that people have for one another. Definitely take up Native Child. R.C. Binstock’s already distinguished contributions have grown yet again.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews