John Burnham Schwartz

[Northwest Corner] is John Burham Schwartz's follow through to [Reservation Road] but stands well on it's own (confession: I always meant to read the earlier work but never got around to it. I'll be taking care of that soon). In Reservation Road, lawyer Dwight Arno hits and kills a classmate of his son, Sam, who is in the back seat of the car at the time, as they are driving home in a hurry to his ex-wife's house. He leaves the scene and doesn't confess to the crime until months later when show more he is confronted by the boy's father.

[Northwest Corner] opens several years after Dwight has completed his sentence and, in the traditional trajectory of the outcast, fled west to California. He hasn't seen his son in years, perhaps since he went to prison, and when Sam shows up on his doorstep after fleeing the consequences of a violent incident at college, it would seem that the sins of the father are destined to shape the fate of the son.

While the novel explores the relationship between father and son and how each shapes the other's life for good and ill, the strongest presence in the book is neither Dwight nor Sam, but the many years dead Josh Lerner. The lost son whose absence is so vitally felt that it becomes another character, a black hole at the center of the survivors' universe, and how the survivors interact with this Josh-in-absentia is at the core of the novel. There is a flashback scene in the center of the book where Josh pokes and prods at the bloated carcass of a deer and his father admonishes him to leave the dead in peace, but this admonishment proves impossible to heed for those left standing after Josh's death. They cluster in small, interweaving groups around his absence, never intersecting until the end of the novel. show less

If you are the author, please stop reading! Suffice it to say, I don't think you're a bad person or a bad writer, but I did not like this book and was not kind to it. Please turn back now.

If you're looking for an honest, if ornery, opinion about this book, I say: what a waste of time.

SPOILERS: Claire Marvel is an art student whose father is diagnosed with cancer not long after she meets Julian Rose. She goes to France and her father dies. She marries someone else. Claire has an affair with show more Julian. She gets pregnant, miscarries a couple times, leaves her husband and it’s believed she kills herself.

ANOTHER SPOILER: it was an accident, she was totally gonna get her act together and get back together with the nice guy.

That’s really most of what we learn about Claire in this book, named for her. But she’s a illusion chased by a butterfly catcher, when in fact it is she who should have been the narrator of this tepid tale of banality.

NOT A SPOILER: But then we could not have been shocked with the reveal that this is just the cruel hand that fate deals us! I was so angry when I finished this book.

I need to stop reading contemporary books that go for cheap thrills. show less

John Burnham Schwartz's NORTHWEST CORNER is simply one of the most moving, page-turning novels I have read in a long time. With his super short and precisely worded chapters, Mr. Schwartz's writing is evocative proof positive that less is indeed more. Here's an early sample that let me know I was going to love this book. Protagonist Dwight Arno, a divorced ex-con who has not seen his son in more than a decade, suddenly has him back in his life, and he doesn't know how to deal with it. show more Watching him sleep, he is suddenly afraid his son is dead -

"I'm halfway to the bed, stepping panicked over my set of dumbbells strewn across the rubber-matted floor, when I see his chest rise. I stop to watch him breathing in and out, until I'm sure."

A simple enough description of a father's sudden and unreasonable panic for the safety of his child, albeit a 22 year-old one. It made me remember when I was a new father and would often lean over my infant son's sleeping body, watching, listening to him breathe, sometimes touching him to be sure. Dwight Arno may have been an absent father, a distant father, but even then, after years apart from his son, he was still very much a father. Schwartz is a master of finding the right word, the perfect phrase. The kind of writing I found here, in NORTHWEST CORNER, is rare and precious. It packs a powerful emotional punch.

I know that this novel is a sequel to an earlier one, RESERVATION ROAD. I gotta read that book. In the meantime, I will press this one on anyone who appreciates fine writing. Very highly recommended. show less

I generally adore historical fiction, and have read both Shogun & Memoirs of a Geisha. This is well-researched and very nicely written. That said: I am really tired of men trying to plumb the depths of women, (Asian or otherwise) especially when they themselves are white and privileged. Clavell I can give a pass to, since Mariko was not the principal character. Golden & Schwartz, however, may receive kudos from the reviewers, but they will always be what all men who write women as principal show more characters are, (and perhaps will always be): dreaming.
Yes, on a superficial level, they seem like real women - but they are the idealized version of what men think, believe, or wish women are/could be. While I agree that authors should be allowed to use whatever voice they feel best articulates their point, in point of fact, no man can ever claim that his female character has a truly authentic interior voice. Sorry folks, but IMHO that is the way it is. Until society reforms itself to the point where men & women undergo identical socialization, meet identical expectations of behavior and achievement, and therefore have identical interior monologues, that is also the way it will stay. That is why I gave it 3 stars-that & the fact that I couldn't figure out how to rate it at only 2.5! show less