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Kentucky Voices
Scissors, Paper, Rock
For the first time since he left his birthplace in Kentucky for San Francisco, Raphael Hardin has returned home alone. Before, he had always brought men with him on his visits, lovers with whom his mother had been “civil, even flirtatious,” while his father retreated into his sacred woodshop. Now his mother has died and, at age thirty-six, Raphael has come back to see his dying father, who knows and disapproves of Raphael’s boyfriends but who is unaware that this, his youngest child, may be ill as well. Raphael’s halting, often painful attempt to reconcile with his father forms the centerpiece of Fenton Johnson’s astonishing novel. At times funny, at times heartbreakingly poignant, Scissors, Paper, Rock explores with wisdom and humor the many kinds of family, the infinite varieties of love. Through the intricately interwoven stories of the Hardin parents and children, Scissors, Paper, Rock contrasts the families we inherit — our blood ties — with the families we choose, our partners in love and our friends.
226 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1993
24 people are currently reading
321 people want to read
About the author
Fenton Johnson
33 books44 followersFenton Johnson is an award-winning author who teaches in the creative writing programs at the University of Arizona and Spalding University.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Fenton^Johnson
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Fenton^Johnson
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
March 8, 2025
This book turned out to be a lovely surprise. After a slow start it bloomed into a gentle and understated family saga limited to only two generations, really.
The language is appealing with a couple of phrases that make you pause to savour them.
The structure is unusual; a series of disjointed chapters that work a little like short stories along a deconstructed timeline. In the first half or so, each story presents the point of view of a different member of the family at a different point in the 20th century. Later the focus becomes more acute but remain kaleidoscopic.
This is a book about the stories people tell themselves about each other and the deleterious effect of terminal diseases or the imminence of death, but it isn't dark or depressing in any way. In fact Scissors, Paper, Rock (I'm not sure about the title) is imbued with a subtle optimism, I think.
The language is appealing with a couple of phrases that make you pause to savour them.
The structure is unusual; a series of disjointed chapters that work a little like short stories along a deconstructed timeline. In the first half or so, each story presents the point of view of a different member of the family at a different point in the 20th century. Later the focus becomes more acute but remain kaleidoscopic.
This is a book about the stories people tell themselves about each other and the deleterious effect of terminal diseases or the imminence of death, but it isn't dark or depressing in any way. In fact Scissors, Paper, Rock (I'm not sure about the title) is imbued with a subtle optimism, I think.
November 1, 2012
This book was recommended to be by my boyfriend-at-the-time who was teaching a course on AIDS literature. He couldn't stop talking about it, and once I read it, I understood why. I loved it, although I found much of it sad,of course. Fenton Johnson is a wonderful writer, and this story will make you rethink the meaning of the word "family."
February 12, 2009
I picked this up totally randomly at a used book store. Usually when I do that with a novel it ends up being a solid 3 star experience-ok but certainly nothing special. This was a pleasant surprise. Subtle, well written, and it tackles a lot of interesting themes.
March 13, 2025
"What matters are not the facts, but the stories they inspire, and our hearts need for creating and preserving these stories to pass on; to me, to them, to you. This is our true act of perfect love."
BRAVOOOO!!! YES YES YES OH YES!!! I am arrested... I am inspired! I am taken back to my roots, yes GAWD *Lips smack*
A subtle story about family set in Kentucky. There were so many characters for a small book but each were so layered and familiar (and damaged high-key). Raphael will go down as a character I will never forget... his struggle to find balance between his blood family in Kentucky and found family in California. Ugh. This book just felt close to me, like I felt seen and empowered hearing how gay sons operate in a southern religious household. I EAT IT UP. AND THE LAST PAGE OF THIS BOOK!?? FULL BODY CHILLS. The way it ends by breaking the fourth wall SHOOK me.
I want to read more Kentucky authors (especially if they gay and write about Kentucky)
BRAVOOOO!!! YES YES YES OH YES!!! I am arrested... I am inspired! I am taken back to my roots, yes GAWD *Lips smack*
A subtle story about family set in Kentucky. There were so many characters for a small book but each were so layered and familiar (and damaged high-key). Raphael will go down as a character I will never forget... his struggle to find balance between his blood family in Kentucky and found family in California. Ugh. This book just felt close to me, like I felt seen and empowered hearing how gay sons operate in a southern religious household. I EAT IT UP. AND THE LAST PAGE OF THIS BOOK!?? FULL BODY CHILLS. The way it ends by breaking the fourth wall SHOOK me.
I want to read more Kentucky authors (especially if they gay and write about Kentucky)
December 9, 2013
The fish lay quiet, gills gasping. "City boy," Rose Ella said. She whetted the hatchet against the rock's edge, clutched it in clenched fists, raised it above her head, plunged it into the fish's flat skull.
November 9, 2014
My fellow reviewers who didn't finish this book missed out. It would have been good had it ended with Raphael; but it goes on a while to end instead with Miss Camellia, which makes it very good.
March 4, 2023
written July 1994
Advertised as the story of an SF gay returning to his Kentucky home to die, this collection of related short stories is that by the end. But along the way it is even more inclusive and interesting than that. As in his life, Raphael's gayness is hardly intrusive, barely mentioned, for most of the book, though at the end it becomes one of the defining facts of his life. Even then, it is less that he is gay than that he is dying of AIDS, like so many of his friends before him, that really matters. This is just the last of a series of wrenching deaths that the book narrates, not all of them physical. Above all the collection chronicles the consequences of choices made in the past -- mainly choices to love or not -- whose rightness and morality at the time somehow seem to shift when reflected on from the perspective of a lifetime lived with the results.
The best stories are the early, previously published ones, which introduce the characters. One jarring but ultimately intelligent choice Johnson has made is to present the family's story out of its chronological order and via multiple narrators (a la Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying), each story featuring a different family member. The book opens with "High Bridge" [1990], with patriarch Tom Hardin in his shop where he copes with his own impending death from cancer, the recent loss of his wife Rose Ella, the return of his son, and his unconsummated relationship with his neighbor, plain old maid schoolteacher and conscience Camilla Perkins. The book ends with "Miss Camilla Speaks" [1992], in which she retells the story of the two trips she and Tom took to the High Bridge (and the two times she said "no" to his advances) and her vain efforts to mother Raphael and to reconcile the boy with his father. In between we learn a little (not enough to like her) of daughter Elizabeth, who is leaving Hollywood and lover Andrew to go "Back Where She Came From" [1991] with ex-husband Dennis in a pickup with a tombstone in the back. This story's conception is much better than its execution, until its final paragraph offers the memorable image of Dennis playing in a pickup basketball game in the middle of nowhere while Elizabeth cheers. Perhaps the best story, "Little Deaths" [1942] zooms back to Rose Ella's first "date" with Tom, which ends with her shooting his injured, nearly drowned hound and deciding to kiss her ambitions goodbye and spend the rest of her life with him in the boonies. "All Fall Down" [1969-72] tells of the life and death of prized son Clark in Vietnam, of Raphael's discovery of homosexuality (though not yet of his own) and his flight from the draft board, of Tom's withdrawal from life to the woodshed. The prior knowledge of Clark's death makes the next story particularly poignant and painful: "The Way Things Will Always Be" [1963] flashes back to Clark's thirteenth year, delivering Christmas baskets and learning to drink and to think like his daddy and dreading life after his father dies. "Cowboys" [1972], another strong one, focuses on Raphael's slow journey through denial to discovery of his sexuality, thanks to Willy, a middle-aged German hitchhiker who lusts after an American cowboy but would be happy with Raph. "Guilt" [1981] features son Joe Ray, whose drunk driving severely injures son Michael but who finds consolation with the other woman in the wreck while his own wife withdraws. The 50-page title story [1988] describes Raphael's long-delayed admission of his sexuality and his disease to his kin.
Advertised as the story of an SF gay returning to his Kentucky home to die, this collection of related short stories is that by the end. But along the way it is even more inclusive and interesting than that. As in his life, Raphael's gayness is hardly intrusive, barely mentioned, for most of the book, though at the end it becomes one of the defining facts of his life. Even then, it is less that he is gay than that he is dying of AIDS, like so many of his friends before him, that really matters. This is just the last of a series of wrenching deaths that the book narrates, not all of them physical. Above all the collection chronicles the consequences of choices made in the past -- mainly choices to love or not -- whose rightness and morality at the time somehow seem to shift when reflected on from the perspective of a lifetime lived with the results.
The best stories are the early, previously published ones, which introduce the characters. One jarring but ultimately intelligent choice Johnson has made is to present the family's story out of its chronological order and via multiple narrators (a la Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying), each story featuring a different family member. The book opens with "High Bridge" [1990], with patriarch Tom Hardin in his shop where he copes with his own impending death from cancer, the recent loss of his wife Rose Ella, the return of his son, and his unconsummated relationship with his neighbor, plain old maid schoolteacher and conscience Camilla Perkins. The book ends with "Miss Camilla Speaks" [1992], in which she retells the story of the two trips she and Tom took to the High Bridge (and the two times she said "no" to his advances) and her vain efforts to mother Raphael and to reconcile the boy with his father. In between we learn a little (not enough to like her) of daughter Elizabeth, who is leaving Hollywood and lover Andrew to go "Back Where She Came From" [1991] with ex-husband Dennis in a pickup with a tombstone in the back. This story's conception is much better than its execution, until its final paragraph offers the memorable image of Dennis playing in a pickup basketball game in the middle of nowhere while Elizabeth cheers. Perhaps the best story, "Little Deaths" [1942] zooms back to Rose Ella's first "date" with Tom, which ends with her shooting his injured, nearly drowned hound and deciding to kiss her ambitions goodbye and spend the rest of her life with him in the boonies. "All Fall Down" [1969-72] tells of the life and death of prized son Clark in Vietnam, of Raphael's discovery of homosexuality (though not yet of his own) and his flight from the draft board, of Tom's withdrawal from life to the woodshed. The prior knowledge of Clark's death makes the next story particularly poignant and painful: "The Way Things Will Always Be" [1963] flashes back to Clark's thirteenth year, delivering Christmas baskets and learning to drink and to think like his daddy and dreading life after his father dies. "Cowboys" [1972], another strong one, focuses on Raphael's slow journey through denial to discovery of his sexuality, thanks to Willy, a middle-aged German hitchhiker who lusts after an American cowboy but would be happy with Raph. "Guilt" [1981] features son Joe Ray, whose drunk driving severely injures son Michael but who finds consolation with the other woman in the wreck while his own wife withdraws. The 50-page title story [1988] describes Raphael's long-delayed admission of his sexuality and his disease to his kin.
March 10, 2022
Just like the name of Jonathan Fenton’s novel, “Scissors, Paper, Rock”, time is anything but the order you expect it to be in in his 1993 exploration of the lives of the Kentucky-based Hardin family.
While several perspectives center tightly around one specific time and place: that of Raphael’s visiting of his father in 1990 as Raphael is dying of AIDS, others, while still important, are less directly relevant, such as the story of Joe Ray, one of Tom’s other sons, who gets in a car accident in which his son is heavily injured and becomes friends with the other woman in the accident.
Of course, after that chapter comes to a close so is Joe Ray relegated for the entirety of the rest of the novel to a background character with no more than a few lines. His wife comes into play for a bit later on as well, but not long before she too bows out forever.
In this, the work calls to mind, to this reader, to “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan, in which stories also span decades between various characters, some of great importance to the story, others less so.
Raphael’s journey to California alongside a hitchhiking foreigner intent on seeing cowboys called Willy, in which Raphael for the first time finds himself directly struggling with his homosexual feelings, could effectively serve as its own short story. It’s also, while not directly relevant to the meeting between father and son, arguably the most valuable of the times and places explored in this novel in that it gives a much needed depth of character to Raphael that others occasionally seem to lack.
Some of the people in Paper, Scissors Rock occasionally don’t feel fully like people so much as old, wise men,: thinking, and often saying aloud, profound or sometimes not so profound but profound-sounding things that very few people would ever actually say in any context.
As an example, Tom Hardin’s friend Miss Camilla tells Raphael near the end of the novel: “Out of their love came you and all your brothers and sisters. This is the chain of being, that breaks and reforms and continues itself in ways of its own devising. I am a dead end. I have no issue. I have nothing to pass on.” (pg.255) Beautiful writing, but it’s difficult for this reader to imagine any situation in which a human being would ever say something like that. Or when Miss Camilla says: “One way to know evil is that those who do it hide from what they have done. You are hiding, here, from what you have done.” (pg.8) This works better, for this reader, as introspection rather than spoken aloud. Said aloud, it sounds artificial, or at best like a line from a fantasy novel rather than a fictional one.
The last chapter, in which Miss Camilla speaks with the dying Raphael, feels like a barrage of ‘profound’ moments and sentences like these. Many of the things said and thought genuinely are profound and interesting, but it feels like they come so rapidly and consistently that their meanings, for this reader, anyway, feel diluted.
The irony is that the same beauty with which the characters constantly seem to think, but far more importantly speak serves to suck the humanity out of the characters. Elegant, beautiful thinking is one thing that can be (mostly) forgiven in prose, but speaking is a whole different thing. The endless proselytizing makes the characters often feel less like their own people and more like mouthpieces for Johnson to philosophize and project his viewpoints onto them. While this is not all bad, it’s the method of inhuman elegance and the frequency with which Fenton delivers these thoughts that rubs this reader the wrong way.
If Fenton had focused more intently, in this case, on AIDS and Raphael’s struggles, rather than numerous characters and timeframes and themes of death and family and grief and memory and so on, it would have probably felt like a far more cohesive work than it is.
Compare this work to a book like “Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West” by Cormac McCarthy, which, over some 350 pages interrogates almost obsessively the nature of violence—or, as Harold Bloom writes, is violence in and of itself. While you could potentially argue Mccarthy explores violence to the point that it gets boring and exhausting, you can at least also argue that that is the entire point.
The amount of themes and profound Fenton tries to pack into this work’s slim 240-something pages, in comparison, simply do not feel quite earned for them to hit in a meaningful way most of the time.
I also felt like the novel was building to some final confrontation, some catharsis, between Raphael and his father. They both die in the same town, in the same hospital, but still, it seems, deeply separate from one another by the novel’s end. A subversion of the reader’s expectations is not necessarily bad, especially in a case like this, given the fact that probably a lot of families never really reconcile around these issues, but I felt like, by the end of this novel, something was missing that might not be so absent if there had been some sort of final encounter, good or bad. This might just be my opinion, but I was confused and unsatisfied at Fenton’s decision to put Raphael with Miss Camilla at the end of the book when all of the emotion and the conflict was not in their relationship, but in Raphael’s relationship with his father, Tom.
Johnson writes in the afterword that Miss Camilla is in many ways an autobiography of himself, the observer and outsider who watches but is never noticed. Given how Camilla is the source of the majority of the out-of-place-sounding aphorisms in this novel and is thus arguably the most inorganic-feeling, this reader wonders at the intelligence of this decision.
Fenton also, in the afterword, notes that “my characters, and at times my narrative voice, made observations that had never occurred to me before their writing.” He treats this idea as if it is some revelatory discovery, but one could potentially argue that most great authors go into writing a work learning many things about their characters or about the story or even about life that they didn’t already have before they began writing.
All in all, this is a novel that is trying too hard to serve as a mouthpiece for the author to deliver numerous unearned profundities, rather than actually giving a real portrait of real, living people.
2/5
While several perspectives center tightly around one specific time and place: that of Raphael’s visiting of his father in 1990 as Raphael is dying of AIDS, others, while still important, are less directly relevant, such as the story of Joe Ray, one of Tom’s other sons, who gets in a car accident in which his son is heavily injured and becomes friends with the other woman in the accident.
Of course, after that chapter comes to a close so is Joe Ray relegated for the entirety of the rest of the novel to a background character with no more than a few lines. His wife comes into play for a bit later on as well, but not long before she too bows out forever.
In this, the work calls to mind, to this reader, to “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan, in which stories also span decades between various characters, some of great importance to the story, others less so.
Raphael’s journey to California alongside a hitchhiking foreigner intent on seeing cowboys called Willy, in which Raphael for the first time finds himself directly struggling with his homosexual feelings, could effectively serve as its own short story. It’s also, while not directly relevant to the meeting between father and son, arguably the most valuable of the times and places explored in this novel in that it gives a much needed depth of character to Raphael that others occasionally seem to lack.
Some of the people in Paper, Scissors Rock occasionally don’t feel fully like people so much as old, wise men,: thinking, and often saying aloud, profound or sometimes not so profound but profound-sounding things that very few people would ever actually say in any context.
As an example, Tom Hardin’s friend Miss Camilla tells Raphael near the end of the novel: “Out of their love came you and all your brothers and sisters. This is the chain of being, that breaks and reforms and continues itself in ways of its own devising. I am a dead end. I have no issue. I have nothing to pass on.” (pg.255) Beautiful writing, but it’s difficult for this reader to imagine any situation in which a human being would ever say something like that. Or when Miss Camilla says: “One way to know evil is that those who do it hide from what they have done. You are hiding, here, from what you have done.” (pg.8) This works better, for this reader, as introspection rather than spoken aloud. Said aloud, it sounds artificial, or at best like a line from a fantasy novel rather than a fictional one.
The last chapter, in which Miss Camilla speaks with the dying Raphael, feels like a barrage of ‘profound’ moments and sentences like these. Many of the things said and thought genuinely are profound and interesting, but it feels like they come so rapidly and consistently that their meanings, for this reader, anyway, feel diluted.
The irony is that the same beauty with which the characters constantly seem to think, but far more importantly speak serves to suck the humanity out of the characters. Elegant, beautiful thinking is one thing that can be (mostly) forgiven in prose, but speaking is a whole different thing. The endless proselytizing makes the characters often feel less like their own people and more like mouthpieces for Johnson to philosophize and project his viewpoints onto them. While this is not all bad, it’s the method of inhuman elegance and the frequency with which Fenton delivers these thoughts that rubs this reader the wrong way.
If Fenton had focused more intently, in this case, on AIDS and Raphael’s struggles, rather than numerous characters and timeframes and themes of death and family and grief and memory and so on, it would have probably felt like a far more cohesive work than it is.
Compare this work to a book like “Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West” by Cormac McCarthy, which, over some 350 pages interrogates almost obsessively the nature of violence—or, as Harold Bloom writes, is violence in and of itself. While you could potentially argue Mccarthy explores violence to the point that it gets boring and exhausting, you can at least also argue that that is the entire point.
The amount of themes and profound Fenton tries to pack into this work’s slim 240-something pages, in comparison, simply do not feel quite earned for them to hit in a meaningful way most of the time.
I also felt like the novel was building to some final confrontation, some catharsis, between Raphael and his father. They both die in the same town, in the same hospital, but still, it seems, deeply separate from one another by the novel’s end. A subversion of the reader’s expectations is not necessarily bad, especially in a case like this, given the fact that probably a lot of families never really reconcile around these issues, but I felt like, by the end of this novel, something was missing that might not be so absent if there had been some sort of final encounter, good or bad. This might just be my opinion, but I was confused and unsatisfied at Fenton’s decision to put Raphael with Miss Camilla at the end of the book when all of the emotion and the conflict was not in their relationship, but in Raphael’s relationship with his father, Tom.
Johnson writes in the afterword that Miss Camilla is in many ways an autobiography of himself, the observer and outsider who watches but is never noticed. Given how Camilla is the source of the majority of the out-of-place-sounding aphorisms in this novel and is thus arguably the most inorganic-feeling, this reader wonders at the intelligence of this decision.
Fenton also, in the afterword, notes that “my characters, and at times my narrative voice, made observations that had never occurred to me before their writing.” He treats this idea as if it is some revelatory discovery, but one could potentially argue that most great authors go into writing a work learning many things about their characters or about the story or even about life that they didn’t already have before they began writing.
All in all, this is a novel that is trying too hard to serve as a mouthpiece for the author to deliver numerous unearned profundities, rather than actually giving a real portrait of real, living people.
2/5
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 25, 2022
"Scissors taught me - is this not why we write, why we read? - that the writign is wiser than I. My characters, and at times my narrative voice, made observations that had never before occurred to me before their writing" - Fenton Johnson (in the updated afterword of 'scissors, paper, rock')
I read and loved this book when it first came out in 1993. Re-reading it years later, maybe with some more appreciation for the craft of fiction, I love it even more.
A novel woven out of stories from different times and places, each with a different main character is wonderful. The characters (most from a Kentucky family) bring their own intrigues, each acutely aware of constraints life has dealt, by culture and psyche. You can still see/feel them dreaming as they struggle.The through line is a neighbor with her own secrets.
Read this and see what you think yourself. I found it worthwhile.
I read and loved this book when it first came out in 1993. Re-reading it years later, maybe with some more appreciation for the craft of fiction, I love it even more.
A novel woven out of stories from different times and places, each with a different main character is wonderful. The characters (most from a Kentucky family) bring their own intrigues, each acutely aware of constraints life has dealt, by culture and psyche. You can still see/feel them dreaming as they struggle.The through line is a neighbor with her own secrets.
Read this and see what you think yourself. I found it worthwhile.
July 18, 2025
The language is beautiful and the story is moving. At first it’s a bit confusing, because it jumps around in time and the people it focuses on. But you soon realize the author is weaving a tapestry — or perhaps making a pieced quilt — that allows you to see an entire family and its interrelationships and dynamics. It is not a happy book, but the portraits of the key characters are brilliant and poignant and explain many things. Raphael’s challenges as a gay man in a small Kentucky town — he is not “out” — are similar to what I have read in other books, but still heartbreaking. Also, I had forgotten about the devastation caused by the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, even though I had a dear family member who died of AIDS. I highly recommend this book, if only to read the poetic writing.
December 16, 2024
You can tell Johnson is writing from experience when he describes the clash between the old and the new in rural Kentucky, Tom Hardin being an especially vivid and believable character (for better or worse he reminded me a lot of my grandfather from Ashland). This was the first novel I'd ever read about the HIV/AIDS crisis, and it encouraged me to dive deeper into that history. I was also previously unfamiliar with the Catholic presence in Nelson County, and found the fusion of Catholic and Kentuckian culture very interesting to read about.
February 28, 2022
A difficult book to read
It is very well written but the subject matter is hard. Having lost friends to aids in the 80s and 90s it was hard to relive.
The book is about family and well worth the read.
It is very well written but the subject matter is hard. Having lost friends to aids in the 80s and 90s it was hard to relive.
The book is about family and well worth the read.
May 8, 2024
I read this for KY bookclub and was in a hurry to finish it. There is a lot of depth to the book. I’m still thinking about “fox on the run” and how much wasn’t said. We had a good book club discussion. Probably should read it again sometime
March 31, 2019
Genre: Fiction / 5 stars
Excellent book; beautifully written / Would highly recommend
Excellent book; beautifully written / Would highly recommend
September 11, 2022
Wow! My first book by this author and it won't be my last. Looking forward to reading The Man Who Loved Birds
November 30, 2024
4.25⭐️
This book is heart wrenching, and a wonderful exploration of family, love and the stories we leave behind.
This book is heart wrenching, and a wonderful exploration of family, love and the stories we leave behind.
July 26, 2024
I enjoyed the structure of this book; it read almost like short stories. Fenton Johnson is a wonderful writer and addressed topics that were a lot more taboo at the time of publication than they are now. It sparked a great discussion at book club presented by Kentucky Humanities' "Kentucky Reads" program.
May 30, 2016
When I first read this novel back in 1997, it was in the midst of a lot of class reading for my MA in English. I remember appreciating it, but along with several other books, I too quickly pored through it.
Now, with the re-release of this great book, I spent most of a weekend diving into the various perspectives of a Southern family, their strife and struggles, particularly one of their children, Rafael, who grows up a gay man distant from his family, only to return home to die.
That's not a spoiler. Death is approached with a direct focus from the beginning, and that's just one of this book's merits, along with the creative time shifts between chapters.
Several aspects make this a great novel. The interconnected chapters shift point-of-view (father, mother, son, daughter, and finally, neighbor), and read like stand-alone short stories with their own structure. As a whole, its fullness is absorbed as the legacy of a dying family, complete with tragedies and doubt, loss and love.
In the afterwords, the author mentions his work's notable blend of Southern family and AIDS novel, themes that had been previously more often separate. Johnson's work melds the two as they should be, for no family, despite its denial, does not suffer from loss. The story, like one of its narrators, admits that it's told with a lot of truth, but a bit of personal myth-making.
Now, with the re-release of this great book, I spent most of a weekend diving into the various perspectives of a Southern family, their strife and struggles, particularly one of their children, Rafael, who grows up a gay man distant from his family, only to return home to die.
That's not a spoiler. Death is approached with a direct focus from the beginning, and that's just one of this book's merits, along with the creative time shifts between chapters.
Several aspects make this a great novel. The interconnected chapters shift point-of-view (father, mother, son, daughter, and finally, neighbor), and read like stand-alone short stories with their own structure. As a whole, its fullness is absorbed as the legacy of a dying family, complete with tragedies and doubt, loss and love.
In the afterwords, the author mentions his work's notable blend of Southern family and AIDS novel, themes that had been previously more often separate. Johnson's work melds the two as they should be, for no family, despite its denial, does not suffer from loss. The story, like one of its narrators, admits that it's told with a lot of truth, but a bit of personal myth-making.
April 8, 2011
This book has been sitting on my shelf a long time. I have no idea where it came from. Looking at the other reviews people think very highly of it - I just couldn't get into it but I expect it is actually very well written and I just was not in the right place to read it another story of a disfunctional, southern family. Reminded me somewhat of The Moonflower Vine in style. Intense chapters about various family members but no overall coherence. I am afraid I still like plots and dying of aids while not talking about it to your family just isn't one for me.
January 22, 2017
This was a fantastic book. Spoke to me on so many levels - the strongest level being the Kentucky connection. It reminded me, at times, of Winesburg, OH, Wendell Berry and a touch of Steinbeck. The Afterward that was just written for this new re-release of the book was equally enlightening - answering some of the questions I had about the characters, the realities, the influences, etc. Can't wait to read more.
August 18, 2007
Excellent fiction... I met Fenton once. VERY great writer of beautiful prosaic prose.
November 12, 2010
some gems in this story
September 26, 2012
I tried to get into this book. Really, I gave it 4+ chapters. No go.
February 14, 2016
A masterful depiction of a sprawling family in the rural south across decades of time. A delightful, thoughtful read.
December 9, 2008
Tried to read it but just couldn't get into it!
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews