Fourth of July Creek

Fourth of July Creek, by Smith Henderson, is an occasionally brilliant but overlong novel about children and how they are failed by the adults charged to take care of them. It is seen through the eyes of Pete Snow, a social worker working for the Department of Family Services in rural Montana. In a case of "physician, heal thy self," Snow can barely take of himself, and then has his fourteen-year-old daughter run away from home.

But that isn't the main story. That would be Snow's odd relationship with a man, Jeremiah Pearl, and his son. Pearl is one of those guys who fears the government and heads to the hills, puncturing holes in coins to express his distrust of U.S. currency. Snow, interested in the well-being of Ben, the boy, comes to a grudging friendship with Pearl, who guards a dark secret.

Snow is one of those characters who is mercilessly mistreated by his creator. He gets rip-roaring drunk, falls in love with a woman who betrays him spectacularly, gets beaten up by a law enforcement officer, has his father die, and his house burn down. That's not to mention his daughter running away and becoming a prostitute.

The action takes place around 1980, and I've been trying to figure out why. There are a few mentions of the time period--the election of Reagan, the eruption of Mount St. Helene's. But I didn't find the time setting to have a profound meaning on the events of the story. Whenever an author does this now, I suspect it has to do with not having to deal with the Internet or cell phones.

If the story isn't particularly enthralling--it took me forever to get through it--the writing is often vivid and memorable. Henderson has a way of equating color with a variety of emotions: "Wyoming, which means to drive through ugly subscrape the color of dirty pennies," or "What did he smell like? Like brown. Like whiskey, tobacco, and river water."

Befitting a novel set in Montana, Henderson also celebrates the wilderness and the characters' relationship to it: "He sat on the limestone in the dark. Felt the notches carved by water into the rock. He'd have wept but for the cocaine and the numbness and the queer sensation that the stones all around him were subtly shifting position. The very ground seemed to writhe. Nearby something slipped into the water. He wondered was he both seeing and hearing things."

I suppose the foremost reason this novel didn't send me over the moon is that the subject matter is so overdone--missing children and anti-government wackos, both in one novel. Henderson does not do enough with these trends to make them transcend their ubiquity.