John Burnham Schwartz

After I finished Reservation Road, countless questions lingered amid disparate emotions coupled not only with the painful narrative which continued to haunt me, but also the enduring legacy foisted upon the memorable characters of Dwight, Sam, and Ruth of the Arno family pitted against Ethan, Grace, and Emma Lerner begging to be explored.

Twelve years later, Northwest Corner spiritedly revisits Dwight Arno, outwardly transformed and contrite, vaguely expectant in his new West Coast show more surroundings, mindful of the compulsory physical and emotional distance essential to create a life anew without relentless reminders of one careless moment that shattered two families into irrevocable pieces. The pivotal tragedy alone did not thrust Dwight into these recent circumstances; rather his immediate unforgivable response mingled with excessive evasive subterfuge disqualified him from any possible future in his previously fractured existence.

Once the solitary motivation in Dwight's circumspect memories, his collegiate son Sam now stands in a similar place after his violent and physically brutal attack upon another young man as he hastily chooses an unplanned disparate course of action, an abrupt departure from his UConn dorm room, West Coast bound aboard a Greyhound bus to Santa Barbara and his father. When the sins of the father become a heavy burden to bear alone and lie befuddled upon a son's hazy conscience, the ominous consequences of inexplicable rage are quickly disowned.

Succinctly, yet sparingly the author reveals the parsimonious remnants of each affected character's life. He unconsciously captures you with his eloquent words and deftly draws you in to vicariously endure those profusely diverse emotions deftly woven within the gritty details that accompany life's most unexpected torturous moments accompanied by their insurmountable losses.

If John Burnham Schwartz's intent is to unceremoniously immerse the reader into each distinctively disquieting character's churning vortex of inner thoughts and feelings, he is successful beyond all expectations. Every single page is a pithy volume of overwhelmingly unforgettable words that linger long after it is read. Minute corners of the mind and heart are brutally bared until mercy finally prevails. Ultimately love empowers and redemption triumphs. 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

[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

1.5 out of 5: The Commoner tells the story of Haruku, the daughter of a Japanese business man who catches the eye of the Crown Prince of Japan. Basically, this is a Japanese Cinderella story with a more equivocal ending. Despite the timelessness of the story and the evocative setting of the Imperial Palace, The Commoner is unsuccessful on many levels. Schwartz’s attempt to do too much in too few pages is the most glaring problem. The narrative covers Haruku’s life before the Imperial show more Palace, the Crown Prince’s courtship, her integration into the Imperial Palace, the birth of the next generation, and the next generation’s repetition of Haruku’s choice to give up the life of a commoner for the life of a royal. Schwartz raises interesting themes and introduces some promising characters and relationships along the way, but he doesn’t have time to examine anything in depth. Superficiality of plot development and characterization is the unhappy result. Additionally, Schwartz’s prose is sometimes so ridiculous that I almost gave up reading at several points along the way. I cannot explain what I mean except with a few examples:
“The air-raid siren was so loud it obliterated the self; it sent us running from where we stood with such terror that our pasts were momentarily left behind.”
“A light but stirring breeze entered the house through the open windows and breathed innocent secrets onto the legs of every woman in the room.” (I promise I am not making these up.)
“The tremor had been in my imagination, that deep underground cavern where hope and feeling need not live in fear of each other.”
“[L]ife is not an echo, endlessly returning the past to us so that we might read and reread in its fading variations the meanings we cannot keep ourselves from wanting.” (Huh?)
These sentences do not make any more sense in context than they make in this review. If you enjoy well-crafted prose that actually means something, The Commoner is likely to annoy you.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License (short reviews, real opinions): litlicense.blogspot.com show less