Oklahoma Author Tim Tharp
Oklahoma author Tim Tharp reached a rarified level of acclaim when his 2008 novel The Spectacular Now was one of five titles nominated for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. His two previous novels, Falling Dark and Knights of the Hill Country, raked in their share of honors as well and are equally compelling reads.
Falling Dark chronicles a struggling small-town Oklahoma family dealing with a legacy of violence, substance abuse, and broken dreams. Its poetically spare language echoes with the realism of all of Tharp’s writing, and it’s clear the author has spent a lifetime carefully listening to the cadences and quirks of his native state’s dialect. While the novel is inhabited by ragged characters at the margins of society, it holds out a few shreds of hope and redemption amid the falling darkness.
Tharp’s second novel, Knights of the Hill Country, is categorized like The Spectacular Now as a “Young Adult” novel. That complicated audience deserves its own share of great writing, but Tharp’s books are powerful reading for any fiction fans.
Knights is the story of an Oklahoma high school football hero who is gifted with the rare ability to slow down time, but only between the sidelines. On the field where his 6′4″ linebacker’s frame hones in on helpless ballcarriers, Hampton Green is a hero and small-town legend in the making. Off the field, the speed and complications of life aren’t as easily grappled with, and Hampton is caught between the identity his town and teammates have boxed him into and an uncertain future he fights to control for himself.
Like his other novels, Knights of the Hill Country employs the unmistakeable twang of Oklahoma dialects. Tharp also has an especially sharp sense of the kinds of adolescent challenges that often aren’t overcome simply by blowing out 18 candles on a birthday cake. His characters deal with issues of race, class, and sexuality at least as complicated as those in their parents’ worlds, and as in The Spectacular Now, they face the stark reality of graduation with a mixture of tentative hope and fear of an unknowable future.
Tim Tharp is a native of Henryetta, Oklahoma, and in between his time as a student at OU and Brown University he explored the United States as a hitchhiker and worked as a factory hand, construction worker, and psychiatric aid. He is currently a professor in the Humanities Department at Rose State College in Midwest City.
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Hi, Chris. I can officially report that Tharp’s book “The Spectacular Now” is a finalist for the 2009 Oklahoma Book Awards. The Oklahoma Center for the Book sent letters out today. (Tim, if you find this out here, know the letter is in the mail.)
All three of his books have been finalists, and “Knights of the Hill Country” was a winner in the young adult category.
Thanks, Chris, for blogging about this fine Oklahoma author.
–Bill