Indiana, Indiana - Laird Hunt

REVIEWS

The Chicago Tribune
"Indiana, Indiana" straddles the line between poetry and fiction. It tells
a story, but the plot comes slowly through beautiful language that rolls gently
across the page.

It's the story of Noah Summers as he sits feeding the fire and thinking back
over his life on an Indiana farm. The memories are dominated by his love for
Opal, the lovely but unstable woman he lived with for 42 days before Opal's
mental illness forced her away. Their letters to each other over the ensuing
decades are dropped in among Noah's memories. He thinks back on his parents, andon the tricks of his own mind that let him foresee the future or peek in on the past. "I think I got a whirlwind in my head sometimes," Noah writes Opal."Certainly, it is filled with whoosh."

Noah's father, Virgil, has a fondness for what he calls "Fifty Percent
Stories," those where the listener understands only half of what he has heard.
The reader spends much of this book in the land of 50-percent clarity. But by the end, Noah and Opal's full story becomes clear. Virgil says it's unreasonable
for Noah to wish for such clarity in his own life. If a key to understanding
does appear, Virgil says, "it will likely come too heavily encrypted to make
heads or tails out of, like a breviary of sacred phrases in one of the Hittite
dialects, or a map of the stars in Chinese."

Ira Sher
The Journal News -- end of year favorites
This summer I read Laird Hunt's wonderful "Indiana, Indiana," in which Noah Summers, a strange and child-like man in his twilight years, wanders a
lifetime's memories on a winter's night. Noah's recollections are as much visions as acts of recall — he is psychic, and one feels perpetually in the timeless
present of his memories, places where Mr. Hunt conjures a wild and rural past of the dead and gone, as Noah himself has so frequently conjured secret or future things to walk visibly in the Indiana countryside. Indiana, Indiana is an
episodic story of love lost and a nearly vanished America, whose fragments each speak little worlds and whose landscape one can only leave at the end with
regret.

Publisher's Weekly
"…crisp and visceral in its evocation of Noah's inner and outer landscapes… an autumnal serenade to rural America."

Ruminator Review
"Hunt is wise in his use of poetic finery…. In a book framed around burials, Hunt's word craft is where the living gets done. The novel in general could stand for more risk taking; all it requires is some narrative confidence and a love of language. Laird Hunt showcases oceans of both…an all-too-rare success in an all-too-rare style.

Booklist
"A haunting and enigmatic tale told in short, poetic chapters redolent of the subtle Indiana landscape by turns illuminated by fireflies and assaulted by wild weather, it is filtered through the strange psyche of an older man named Noah, who lives in shabby isolation on a cluttered farm. Sitting beside a wood-burning stove, Noah is assailed by troubling memories of the debilitating fits and visions that rendered him incapable of living a normal life. His poignant reflections, which obliquely reveal much about the struggles and woes of Noah's hard-pressed ancestors and immediate family, and the painful mystery of mental illness, are interspersed with short, highly imaginative letters from Noah's wife, Opal, a woman, the reader slowly figures out, whose own psychic afflictions, much to Noah's sorrow, landed her in an asylum. Hunt's somber and quietly beautiful novel is like a slide show, each moody and visually lush chapter a luminous and evocative tableau cast upon the mind of the reader."

Library Journal
This second novel (after The Impossibly) from Hunt, a former press officer for the UN, is a composite of impressionistic vignettes, the rambling reminiscences of an old man, and letters written by a madwoman-the sum of which challenge the reader to piece together its narrative. The reminiscing is done by Noah Summers, the last living member of an eccentric Indiana farm family, as he drowses in his cluttered tool shed. As he dreams, he recalls the incredible experiences of his insane life, including his brief, youthful marriage to the beautiful (and most likely schizophrenic) Opal. The relationship ended when his parents had her committed to a local insane asylum-with good reason-an act for which Noah never forgave them. Everyone in the community is aware that Noah himself has always been crazy, but his insanity has also been a rare gift, with psychic visions that have prompted the sheriff to ask his assistance in solving the occasional crime. Yet the power of this novel reaches beyond Noah's unusual youth and poignant love story. Hunt uses Noah's insanity as a means to amplify ordinary things, like the beauty and starkness of the Midwest and the loneliness of old age. Written in lyrical-if sometimes baffling-prose, the novel succeeds at calling up the ghosts of a generation and a way of life that have almost disappeared. Highly recommended for all literary fiction collections.

Kirkus Reviews
"Faulknerian…vivid (and heartbreaking)."

Jeffrey DeShell
The Review of Contemporary Fiction:
At first glance, Laird Hunt’s second novel seems very different from his
debut (The Impossibly). Whereas the first was set in various unnamed European
cities, this novel takes place in the American rural Midwest; while the first
featured labyrinthine sentences of contradiction, retractions and qualifications,
the sentences here are lyrical, liquid, natural and evocative; whereas The
Impossibly portrayed sophisticated shadow figures engaged in obscure Spy vs. Spy machinations, Indiana, Indiana tells the story of an older farmer, his
family, his visions and his love.

Still, both books demonstrate Hunt’s unique talent for the individual
detail, as well as his extraordinary ability to completely imagine and construct
entire fictive worlds. Indiana, Indiana is composed of minute, intimate and
memorable details: a windowsill littered with flies, the stump of a saw
player’s missing finger, the red feather of a cardinal against the blackened trees.
Hunt possesses a poet’s eye for the evocative image, and it’s tempting to
luxuriate in his descriptive prose. His images can stop time, and it’s a
wonderful feeling when you begin to realize the momentum sneaking up on you, when you begin to feel the subterranean connections and see the veiled linkages, when you recognize the narrative beneath the stillness.

Hunt also knows, more than any American writer I’ve read recently, what
to leave out. Or more precisely, he understands that creating a complete
fictive world is dependent on creating absence and void as well as presence: "For every piece of their lives that is still visible, said Virgil, there are
thousands of pieces that are not." Hunt is a master of those invisible pieces.
Indiana, Indiana is a subtle, elegant and haunting novel.

Bookmunch
Noah is old and, except for some cats, alone in front of the fireplace. He doesn't mind being alone, really, because secretly there are others with him, talking to him. His father, mostly - his father talks to him magestically and atlength, as he did when Noah was a kid, and as he stopped doing later. That was after Opal, after the fire. Noah is sitting in front of the fireplace in his shed and thinking about Opal and the fire. This is the beginning, and the end, of the story.

Indiana, Indiana could make arsonists of all who read it, or at least set
fires inside them somewhere. It's the story of Noah, a kid who's now an oldman,
and Opal, his wife, and their son, and his parents. It's a story about stories, about the power in words, how words can keep flames going long after you would've thought they'd consumed all there was to consume.

Noah is no ordinary child, and his father, Virgil, has more to do with his
classical namesake than he does with any of the adopted farmland around him.
They are both larger than life. Virgil tells impossible stories that can't be
figured out; Noah has visions that are all too clear. He sees the future in a
pasture, then finds a clockface buried there. Sometimes he sees things that help
the sheriff solve crimes. Sometimes he doesn't tell what he sees. Noah isn't
quite right in the head and Virgil is maybe just too right. But that doesn't
matter until later - after Opal. Opal is strange and beautiful and also maybe
not quite right in the head, and she and Noah fall in love. Her letters to him
are like slices of the naked innocent heart of a dreaming muse. He reads them,
all these years later, when he's old, he sits by the fire with the cats and he
reads her letters and it hurts you to watch him.

Laird Hunt writes like the flesh-stripped skeleton of Cormac McCarthy, left
in the desert for a hundred years to think things over and decide what's
important. Only a few things happen in the story, but they, and Opal's letters,
and the fire, are enough to wake the dead and feed the thoughts of an old man on his last night. And if that's not enough for you...well, it had better be.

Any Cop?: Oh yes - grim, elegant, often funny, Indiana, Indiana brings fierce
mythmaking power back to that bland, ugly, vague middle part of the USA.


Laird Hunt

	HOME
	HOME			Indiana, Indiana (the dark & lovely portions of the night) Available now on Coffee House Press. A sad and lovely tale...set in rural Indiana...it is snowing...dead moths glint in the firelight...there are letters, visions, voices that come out of the walls...clocks dug out of fields...funny expressions...curious masks...conversations about electro-shock therapy...not to be missed... Visit the audio archive at www.conjunctions.com to hear a little of the book: an Indiana Christmas tale complete with sleighs, blanket-lined boxes, two sleepy boys and a copy of Vergil. The first three sections of Indiana, Indiana are be serialized online by Fence Magazine. Check back for more info, excerpts, and oddities...
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			REVIEWS The Chicago Tribune "Indiana, Indiana" straddles the line between poetry and fiction. It tells a story, but the plot comes slowly through beautiful language that rolls gently across the page. It's the story of Noah Summers as he sits feeding the fire and thinking back over his life on an Indiana farm. The memories are dominated by his love for Opal, the lovely but unstable woman he lived with for 42 days before Opal's mental illness forced her away. Their letters to each other over the ensuing decades are dropped in among Noah's memories. He thinks back on his parents, andon the tricks of his own mind that let him foresee the future or peek in on the past. "I think I got a whirlwind in my head sometimes," Noah writes Opal."Certainly, it is filled with whoosh." Noah's father, Virgil, has a fondness for what he calls "Fifty Percent Stories," those where the listener understands only half of what he has heard. The reader spends much of this book in the land of 50-percent clarity. But by the end, Noah and Opal's full story becomes clear. Virgil says it's unreasonable for Noah to wish for such clarity in his own life. If a key to understanding does appear, Virgil says, "it will likely come too heavily encrypted to make heads or tails out of, like a breviary of sacred phrases in one of the Hittite dialects, or a map of the stars in Chinese." Ira Sher The Journal News -- end of year favorites This summer I read Laird Hunt's wonderful "Indiana, Indiana," in which Noah Summers, a strange and child-like man in his twilight years, wanders a lifetime's memories on a winter's night. Noah's recollections are as much visions as acts of recall — he is psychic, and one feels perpetually in the timeless present of his memories, places where Mr. Hunt conjures a wild and rural past of the dead and gone, as Noah himself has so frequently conjured secret or future things to walk visibly in the Indiana countryside. Indiana, Indiana is an episodic story of love lost and a nearly vanished America, whose fragments each speak little worlds and whose landscape one can only leave at the end with regret. Publisher's Weekly "…crisp and visceral in its evocation of Noah's inner and outer landscapes… an autumnal serenade to rural America." Ruminator Review "Hunt is wise in his use of poetic finery…. In a book framed around burials, Hunt's word craft is where the living gets done. The novel in general could stand for more risk taking; all it requires is some narrative confidence and a love of language. Laird Hunt showcases oceans of both…an all-too-rare success in an all-too-rare style. Booklist "A haunting and enigmatic tale told in short, poetic chapters redolent of the subtle Indiana landscape by turns illuminated by fireflies and assaulted by wild weather, it is filtered through the strange psyche of an older man named Noah, who lives in shabby isolation on a cluttered farm. Sitting beside a wood-burning stove, Noah is assailed by troubling memories of the debilitating fits and visions that rendered him incapable of living a normal life. His poignant reflections, which obliquely reveal much about the struggles and woes of Noah's hard-pressed ancestors and immediate family, and the painful mystery of mental illness, are interspersed with short, highly imaginative letters from Noah's wife, Opal, a woman, the reader slowly figures out, whose own psychic afflictions, much to Noah's sorrow, landed her in an asylum. Hunt's somber and quietly beautiful novel is like a slide show, each moody and visually lush chapter a luminous and evocative tableau cast upon the mind of the reader." Library Journal This second novel (after The Impossibly) from Hunt, a former press officer for the UN, is a composite of impressionistic vignettes, the rambling reminiscences of an old man, and letters written by a madwoman-the sum of which challenge the reader to piece together its narrative. The reminiscing is done by Noah Summers, the last living member of an eccentric Indiana farm family, as he drowses in his cluttered tool shed. As he dreams, he recalls the incredible experiences of his insane life, including his brief, youthful marriage to the beautiful (and most likely schizophrenic) Opal. The relationship ended when his parents had her committed to a local insane asylum-with good reason-an act for which Noah never forgave them. Everyone in the community is aware that Noah himself has always been crazy, but his insanity has also been a rare gift, with psychic visions that have prompted the sheriff to ask his assistance in solving the occasional crime. Yet the power of this novel reaches beyond Noah's unusual youth and poignant love story. Hunt uses Noah's insanity as a means to amplify ordinary things, like the beauty and starkness of the Midwest and the loneliness of old age. Written in lyrical-if sometimes baffling-prose, the novel succeeds at calling up the ghosts of a generation and a way of life that have almost disappeared. Highly recommended for all literary fiction collections. Kirkus Reviews "Faulknerian…vivid (and heartbreaking)." Jeffrey DeShell The Review of Contemporary Fiction: At first glance, Laird Hunt’s second novel seems very different from his debut (The Impossibly). Whereas the first was set in various unnamed European cities, this novel takes place in the American rural Midwest; while the first featured labyrinthine sentences of contradiction, retractions and qualifications, the sentences here are lyrical, liquid, natural and evocative; whereas The Impossibly portrayed sophisticated shadow figures engaged in obscure Spy vs. Spy machinations, Indiana, Indiana tells the story of an older farmer, his family, his visions and his love. Still, both books demonstrate Hunt’s unique talent for the individual detail, as well as his extraordinary ability to completely imagine and construct entire fictive worlds. Indiana, Indiana is composed of minute, intimate and memorable details: a windowsill littered with flies, the stump of a saw player’s missing finger, the red feather of a cardinal against the blackened trees. Hunt possesses a poet’s eye for the evocative image, and it’s tempting to luxuriate in his descriptive prose. His images can stop time, and it’s a wonderful feeling when you begin to realize the momentum sneaking up on you, when you begin to feel the subterranean connections and see the veiled linkages, when you recognize the narrative beneath the stillness. Hunt also knows, more than any American writer I’ve read recently, what to leave out. Or more precisely, he understands that creating a complete fictive world is dependent on creating absence and void as well as presence: "For every piece of their lives that is still visible, said Virgil, there are thousands of pieces that are not." Hunt is a master of those invisible pieces. Indiana, Indiana is a subtle, elegant and haunting novel. Bookmunch Noah is old and, except for some cats, alone in front of the fireplace. He doesn't mind being alone, really, because secretly there are others with him, talking to him. His father, mostly - his father talks to him magestically and atlength, as he did when Noah was a kid, and as he stopped doing later. That was after Opal, after the fire. Noah is sitting in front of the fireplace in his shed and thinking about Opal and the fire. This is the beginning, and the end, of the story. Indiana, Indiana could make arsonists of all who read it, or at least set fires inside them somewhere. It's the story of Noah, a kid who's now an oldman, and Opal, his wife, and their son, and his parents. It's a story about stories, about the power in words, how words can keep flames going long after you would've thought they'd consumed all there was to consume. Noah is no ordinary child, and his father, Virgil, has more to do with his classical namesake than he does with any of the adopted farmland around him. They are both larger than life. Virgil tells impossible stories that can't be figured out; Noah has visions that are all too clear. He sees the future in a pasture, then finds a clockface buried there. Sometimes he sees things that help the sheriff solve crimes. Sometimes he doesn't tell what he sees. Noah isn't quite right in the head and Virgil is maybe just too right. But that doesn't matter until later - after Opal. Opal is strange and beautiful and also maybe not quite right in the head, and she and Noah fall in love. Her letters to him are like slices of the naked innocent heart of a dreaming muse. He reads them, all these years later, when he's old, he sits by the fire with the cats and he reads her letters and it hurts you to watch him. Laird Hunt writes like the flesh-stripped skeleton of Cormac McCarthy, left in the desert for a hundred years to think things over and decide what's important. Only a few things happen in the story, but they, and Opal's letters, and the fire, are enough to wake the dead and feed the thoughts of an old man on his last night. And if that's not enough for you...well, it had better be. Any Cop?: Oh yes - grim, elegant, often funny, Indiana, Indiana brings fierce mythmaking power back to that bland, ugly, vague middle part of the USA.

		Excerpt 1: "Noah holds his hands up to the fire. Later, when it is light, and the sun has begun to burn the blue edges off the new snow, Noah plans to take the saw, leave the shed, and set out across the fields. But now it is still dark outside. And it is cold... "