The Book of Hard Things by Sue Halpern

From the Publisher

A provocative first novel that explores the porous borders between friendship, sex and love

At eighteen, Cuzzy Gage has never been out of Poverty, the isolated mountain hamlet where he was born, raised, and--much to the annoyance of his dreamy girlfriend, the mother of his child--seems destined to stay. He is content to hang out and just get by; it's as if ambition hasn't occurred to him. Enter Tracy Edwards, who has come to the area after the death of his close friend, Algernon Black, an ethnomusicologist who specialized in initiation rituals. It's to Black's family estate, the Larches, that Tracy retreats, in grief and confusion, after his friend's death, to archive Algie's work. Through a set of circumstances that look like chance but turn out to be something else entirely, Tracy hires Cuzzy to help sort through Algie's papers. So begins a quiet and ambivalent relationship, one that eventually causes both young men to admit their own histories and to start to rethink the future. As Tracy introduces Cuzzy to poetry and literature and music, he in turn is exposed to the natural world, to a place of granite and schist and other, enduring, hard things. But in a small town their unlikely friendship is inevitably the focus of scrutiny and debate, a debate that ends as no one could have imagined, and makes each of them, in their own way, confront the hardest thing of all.

Poetic and compelling, The Book of Hard Things is a bold fiction debut.

The New York Times

[Halpern's] work here is made especially memorable by the exactness of her tone in evoking small-town tensions, the often misdirected energies of youth and most especially the process of growing up and acquiring an adult sense of responsibility. — James Polk

The New Yorker

Cuzzy Gage, eighteen years old and living in upstate New York, doesn’t have much in the way of prospects: no job, no home, and no family, except for a father in a mental hospital and an estranged girlfriend and their baby son. He’s been camping out in the woods, and winter is coming. When a schoolteacher from New York City takes Cuzzy in—partly to stem his own feelings of drift—an intense, unlikely friendship, full of wariness and misunderstandings, develops. This first novel by the essayist Sue Halpern recalls the author’s nature writing in its evocation of the sparse rock and pine of the Adirondack countryside, dotted with trailers and streams and baronial retreats. At times, the social tensions between characters feel too obviously choreographed: the action takes place in a town called Poverty. But Halpern does her characters—both the deprived locals and the overcivilized, rootless newcomers—the service of neither condescending to nor ennobling them.

Publishers Weekly

Polished and passionate, this debut novel by Halpern (author of the well-received essay collection Migrations to Solitude) is undermined by its unlikely premise: the friendship between a down-and-out backwoods 18-year-old and a 30-something cultural sophisticate. Homeless, aimless "Cuzzy" Gage has no job and no prospects in the tiny New England logging town of Poverty. His mother is dead, his father is in a psychiatric hospital and Crystal, his estranged girlfriend, is now the mother of his child. Some of these sad facts are meant, no doubt, to explain his utter lack of ambition and responsibility, but nothing can explain (despite Halpern's strenuous efforts) why Tracy Edwards, a Porsche-driving teacher with absolutely nothing in common with the local residents, takes Cuzzy into his borrowed home, the estate of his recently deceased best friend, Algie, an ethnomusicologist. Ostensibly, Tracy's acting on a request from Rev. Jason Trimble, who asks his congregation to be "real neighbors" to one another, and Tracy is searching for something to assuage his grief over Algie. But the alliance between Tracy and Cuzzy never rings true. Their intellectual differences are astronomical; their socioeconomic gulf is unbridgeable. Indeed, that gulf leads to a scene of horrific violence, which unfolds with a palpable inevitability (the best section of the book by far). The only character of real interest is Crystal, whose aspirations (culled from People and Marie Claire) are touchingly fantastic. Despite Halpern's often lovely prose, this earnest, self-conscious novel never manages to make real its juxtaposition of disparate worlds. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This debut novel by accomplished nonfiction author Halpern (Four Wings and a Prayer) is set in an isolated northern mountain hamlet called Poverty, which adequately describes the economic and spiritual condition of its residents. Cuzzy Gage, a young man with little hope for a viable future, is hired by the rich, educated Tracy Edwards, who has come to archive the papers of recently deceased friend Algie, a wealthy summer resident and a homosexual. Tracy's association with Algie makes his sexual orientation suspect among Cuzzy and his friends, but Cuzzy continues working with him and, in doing so, is introduced to both Algie's interest in poetry and music and Tracy's awareness of a world outside of Poverty. After settling Algie's estate, Tracy is brutally murdered by two of Cuzzy's friends. Thanks to his relationship with Tracy, we are meant to believe that Cuzzy has matured enough to understand his own passive role in the killing and the ways in which he had been living irresponsibly. But while Halpern offers an insightful glimpse of small-town fears and prejudices, the relationship between Cuzzy and Tracy is not well enough developed to elicit sympathy. Not required for most collections.-David A. Beron , Univ. of New Hampshire Lib., Durham Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

What's more intimate and risky: genuine friendship or romantic love? asks first-novelist/nonfiction author Halpern (Four Wings and a Prayer, 2001, etc.). Troubled adolescent Cuzzy Gage-so-called because he is everyone's cousin in the pointedly named community of Poverty, in upstate New York-has been living in the woods since his uncle kicked him out of the house after Cuzzy slept with the uncle's pregnant live-in niece. His mother died years ago; his minister father is in a mental institution. About to turn 18, Cuzzy has already fathered a child himself, but the baby's mother, a clone of Luanne on TV's King of the Hill, has been refusing to see him, so he spends his time hanging out at the local convenience store with misfits like the cousin who may have molested his sister and the local bully/drug dealer. Polite society, which lives down the road in vacation homes, calls these folks trailer trash. Enter Tracy Edwards in his Porsche. He's staying at one of the largest estate retreats, archiving the papers of his recently dead friend Algie, a musicologist whose advances the heterosexual Tracy rebuffed long ago. Poverty's current minister, Jason Trimble, who's gotten to know Cuzzy's father, approaches Tracy and asks him to help reach the boy. Soon Cuzzy, attracted initially by the wealthy comfort of Tracy's life but hungry for affection, stability, and the world of ideas, is living at the estate and working for Tracy. The older man takes Cuzzy under his wing, trying to be a Good Samaritan, but his privileged naiveté blinds him to the impact of their relationship on the boy's position in Poverty. The result is a tragedy of shocking brutality, especially in contrast to the rather literaryrendering of all that has come before. Carefully crafted and thoughtful, if at times overbearing in telegraphing its messages.

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Slate

"A dense, fine-grained metamorphic rock produced by the compression of various sediments" (Webster's); this is the place to begin; Webster's also says "tabula rasa" is hypothetical. This is important. We come into the world already written upon. Such is our burden. We are indelible.

Cuzzy Gage woke with sand in his mouth from where his head had strayed off the sleeping bag and onto the beach sometime after the girl, Amber-Rose, climbed out around midnight or one -- nobody wore a watch. When he opened his eyes, there was grit in them, too, which he wiped away with the back of a hand that smelled like her sex, his beer. The beach was empty. He guessed it was before seven. The fire they'd lit the night before smoldered nearby. Cuzzy wrestled himself out of the bag and stood over the fire ring with his back slightly arched, waiting a moment, then watching his pee arc and land on the hot rocks, making them steam. He was wearing only a T-shirt that advertised a brand of sneakers, and he was cold. The thinnest skin of ice was beginning to form over the lip of the pond, and the swamp maples had already turned. It was September in those mountains, which is like December a little farther down the road.

He pulled on his jeans, which were warm from being jammed at the bottom of his bag all night, and his socks and steel-tipped boots. There was a piece of candy in his right front pocket, a caramel he'd swiped from the Grand Union days before, and it had melted and hardened enough to make peeling off the wrapper a morning's work. He had nothing else to do -- no job, no place in particular to go. On the other side of the lake was the county road, and he saw, in the distance, a yellow school bus coming closer. Amber-Rose's bus, he decided, though he didn't really know. Amber-Rose was seventeen and still in school. He had been out four months.

He liked Amber-Rose all right. He liked her more than he'd thought he would. She was skinny, scrawny almost, like one of the dogs he'd see sometimes, walking around the woods, who didn't belong to anyone. Amber-Rose belonged to him now, even though he had Crystal, like it or not, and together they had Harry. But Crystal was pretending not to know him; at least she had been the night he met Amber-Rose, as if pretending would reduce the swell of her belly and the life she felt in there. It was graduation night, the last day of May, and he was right here at the town beach, lighting M-80s and working on a case of St. Pauli Girl. She was wasted, too, Amber-Rose was, but not so much that when he asked a group of girls if they had a graduation present for him, she didn't hesitate to follow into the shadows, watch him unzip his one pair of good pants, and, without a word, reach inside. It was summer. It was something to do.

Then Crystal had the baby and called it Harrison Ford, and the only way he could see her was by going to the hospital after her parents had left for the night, and later by sneaking into their trailer-house when they were in bed, which he had been doing the year before. Marcel and Therese weren't Crystal's parents anyway, they were her grandparents, Marcel one generation down from Quebec, a logger as broad and muscular as the Shire horses with which he worked. He could have taken Cuzzy out with a single punch, he could have killed him, but he had done the same thing himself once upon a time, fucking, fucking, fucking, as if, working on his father's farm, he didn't know what that would bring. That day, the day Therese told him, Marcel went to the woods and hauled out three cord by himself, then spent the next week cutting and splitting until his hands were raw and splintered. He sold it green, for firewood, and left the money on the kitchen counter in a grimy envelope. It stayed there a few days, and then he printed the word "kid" on it and the envelope disappeared. Crystal understood it was for her, that he was giving as much of a blessing as he could.

Therese, meanwhile, went from despair to a kind of ecstasy, for though she knew the baby's provenance, she chose in time to forget about Cuzzy's participation and considered Crystal's condition a miracle of conception, a virgin birth. She constantly talked about the baby and to the baby, crocheted countless hats and capes and tiny, doll-footed boots; and made sure she attended every prenatal visit with Crystal. If it was wishful, shutting Cuzzy out, it was a wish that came true. Five months into the pregnancy, just as she was starting to show, Crystal began to ignore Cuzzy. First she stopped sleeping with him, then she stopped letting him touch her, then she wouldn't go out with him, and finally she pretended for a while that he didn't exist and never had.

Crystal was two years out of school when Cuzzy first saw her, working road crew, flagging cars. It was August, and the skin of her neck and face and hands was brown and dry as old varnish, and like varnish, it was chipping. Her hard hat was yellow, and so was her hair, which wagged in the wind. Her face wasn't especially pretty, but when men looked at her, it was not her face they saw but her breasts, which rose from her chest like the Appalachians, steep and round. The guys on the crew called her Beams, short for high beams -- not, they said, because of how they thought she looked but because other guys, driving by, would flash their headlights when they saw her. She didn't care. She was twenty and making good steady money.

When she flagged Cuzzy to a stop that first time, he rolled down the window of his truck and beckoned to her. He didn't know why. It was just something his hand made him do.

"You need something, Cuzzy Gage?" she said when she was ten paces from the vehicle.

Cuzzy, who was absently sucking the end of his middle finger, burned at the tip by the last scrap of a roach the night before, looked at her suspiciously. "How do you know my name?" he demanded.

She looked him over, her eyes traveling up his left arm, which was tanned from sticking out the truck window, to his shoulder, pumped from a summer of shoveling gravel, and up his neck to the curtain of lank brown hair that opened at the cleft in his chin, to his full lips and round, almost pretty cheeks. His eyes were chocolate, the color of pudding, doeish eyes ringed by long black lashes that made him look innocent, always, and surprised. Women, he was noticing, were drawn to his eyes, and to the tentative promise of those black lashes: like maybe he wouldn't be mean.

"You're from Poverty," she said squarely, as if that answered his question.

"So?" he said, challenging her. He didn't like it, didn't like the reference to Poverty, as though it was something he had done, being born and raised in that part of town (so named the day the child-welfare lady went door-to-door asking questions and, upon hearing the answers, declared, "Why, you're living in poverty!" So it was official: They lived in Poverty).

He looked at her directly, her khaki eyes, idling for a better explanation. Her face wasn't half bad, he thought. Prominent cheekbones, a bridge of freckles on her nose, and something -- either ungiving or desperately honest -- about the corners of her mouth. Why had he called her over? He had wanted to know what was happening down the road. He was bored and she was there. Her T-shirt said SINGER EXCAVATING across the front. He looked at it hard, not sure, pretty sure, certain, and grinned then with amazement: both the "I" in "Singer" and the "I" in "Excavating" were dotted from the inside out by the hint of raised flesh.

"Didn't your mother teach you manners?" she said when she saw him staring. There was another truck behind him, and the guy was right on his tail, nudging his bumper.

Cuzzy's grin fell like a shot duck. "She's dead," he said. It had been what, four years already? Blood clot in her brain. Born that way, the doctor said. No better reason than that. Every one of her seconds, from the moment she was born, was numbered.

"573-3184," Crystal said quickly, dismissing him with a broad sweep of her flag. He pushed into gear and rolled out.

"I know Joey," she shouted after him. He was in third by then and could barely hear her.

Copyright © 2003 Sue Halpern