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.

The narrator is Oklahoma City kid Sutter Keely, who careens around Tharp’s piercingly recognizeable renderings of Bricktown, Heritage Hills, and the vast suburban sprawl of the Southside in a haze of of alcohol and testosterone.  The moment described by the book’s title is Sutter’s final semester of high school, when adulthood can only be delayed for a few more precious months.  

The likeable, troubled Sutter exists in a Charlie Brown world where adults are either incomprehensible or totally absent, and it becomes clear that his budding alcoholism won’t be masked by rebellious charisma for much longer.

Unlike many of his peers, Sutter isn’t especially looking forward to college or career plans.  As he drifts from girlfriend to girlfriend on woozy weekends (and weekdays), he asks, “How are you supposed to know when you’re not a kid anymore in this society?” Soon an intriguing and unlikely new friend opens the door to an answer and one possible way out of the numbing suburban maze.

Tharp is a master at drawing young adult characters who are both more sophisticated than adults would think and a little less together than they believe themselves to be.  While Sutter mixes martinis and holds philosophical discourses with his friends, he’s also crushingly oblivious to the ways his behavior affects the people who care about him.

Reviewers have both praised and criticized the matter-of-fact way Tharp illustrates high school drug use and sex.  Rather than glorifying the thrills of late night partying or mixing in a pious sermon about the perils of pre-marital sex, the book honestly presents the life of a teenager the way it’s lived not only in Oklahoma but in every suburb and city in America.  It’s reminiscent of the bluntness of Trainspotting, whose narrator allows that being a junkie surely involves “misery and desperation and death . . . but what people forget is the pleasure of it.  Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.  After all, we’re not @#$%-ing stupid.”

Sutter is far from stupid, but he’s hurtling toward a destructive or meaningless end all the same.  It’s a testament to the quality of Tharp’s writing that the reader wants so badly for the kid to pull out of the spiral, to recognize what we and a precious few people in his life can see about his promise. 

SPECTACULAR UPDATE:

Variety reports The Spectacular Now is being adapted into a feature film by acclaimed music video director Marc Webb, whose debut movie 500 Days of Summer premiered at last month’s Sundance Festival.  The film’s producer hilariously describes it as “somewhere between ‘Sideways,’ ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’”  I only hope the filmmakers are as true to the vivid Oklahoma City/Moore setting as Tharp’s novel is. 

The winner, Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello has been praised as “epic” and “mesmerizing,” as it traces the intertwined family roots of Thomas Jefferson and his house slave and mistress, Sally Hemings.  Gordon-Reed describes the world of American slavery with a broad focus beyond the story of Jefferson and Hemings’s 38-year relationship.  The book takes into account the backdrop of the American Revolution, the troubled lives of Hemings’s siblings, and the extensive and fascinating history of “race-mixing” among the slaveholders of the American south.

Another Nonfiction nominee, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, tells the disturbing and dramatic tale of the U.S. government’s decision-making from the earliest days of the War on Terror following September 11, 2001.  Mayer is unhesitating in her condemnation of un-Constitutional actions taken by White House officials, and she argues that the treatment of U.S.-held prisoners has actually hampered the global pursuit of al-Qaeda.  Mayer’s meticulously researched book attempts to illustrate the balance between acquiring intelligence through the use of torture and the greater price paid by resorting to such tactics.

Kitty has mentioned that local author Tim Tharp was nominated for a 2008 National Book Award for his brand new Young Adult novel The Spectacular Now.  I have read and greatly enjoyed his previous novel, Knights of the Hill Country, which is a riveting story of an Oklahoma high school football hero with a complicated personal life, and I’m really looking forward to reading his highly praised new release. 

The full list of National Book Award nominees and winners can be viewed here, along with links to interviews with and information about all the finalists.

In the fiction category, won by Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, other nominees were Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba, and Salvatore Scibona’s The End.  

Another notable finalist was Marilynne Robinson’s Home.  After a twenty-four year span between her first and second novels, Robinson’s acclaimed third novel appeared a mere four years later.  Admirers of 2004’s remarkable Gilead will be equally interested in Robinson’s new novel, which tells a parallel story set in the same small Iowa town in the 1950s.

Robinson revisits Gilead’s themes of crippling Calvinist guilt and the tensions between judgement and forgiveness, this time through the eyes of the returning, sort-of-prodigal son of a close friend of Gilead’s protagonist, John Ames.  The new novel further powerfully explores the meaning of returning home to face the secrets and injuries of the past.  One reviewer at powells.com notes that as she read Home, the following line from Robert Frost echoed in her head: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”