Falling Dark: A Novel
by Tim TharpMilkweed Editions, 271 pp., $21.95
Tim Tharp’s novel Falling Dark won the prestigious Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and rightly so; it is a beautifully rendered story of our bleak times which manages to leave the reader with a much-welcome whisper of hope for our shared condition. The novel is an inventory of the heartland in both senses of the word — the great America between the happening coasts and the affective territories of our own hearts and lives.
Tharp knows his part of the world: the small towns and rural corners of Oklahoma and the folks who dwell there, working the night shift at the convenience store and holding second jobs stacking hay or loading trucks or whatever meager industry the season may offer. They live in tumble-down trailers and unpainted houses with sagging porches set well back off gravel roads. Behold America far from the nearest Starbucks and rumor of the latest IPO.
In this bleak and commonplace environment, a grieving widow tries to rear her two sons while coping with her own need for rum bottle comfort on a steady basis. One boy is on the cusp of manhood, furtively sipping those first illicit beers and trying to learn to handle desire while tossing on the roiling sea of hormones. The other boy is still an imaginative child switching from a keen awareness of the paucity of his life and his imaginary efforts to save the universe. Tharp renders the latter with brilliant subtlety.
Along the way, his tale examines the small-time marijuana grower, the epidemic of alcohol abuse, and the alienation and despair which is the fabric of many American lives right in the middle of our historic financial boom as a nation. Distribution is everything.
This novel is a substantial achievement and, despite its dark tone, the reader is offered a clue about the palliative and redemptive value of honest relationships. It limns a world not often depicted in fiction.
This article appears in February 4 • 2000.