Susan Henderson (1)

‘’This town wants you to be as it’s always been and do as it’s always done’’, he says, ‘’but what if that’s not what makes you happy?’’

In this small community, which seems to have been stuck in time, being happy isn’t important. It’s not even desirable. Being ‘’proper’’ is all that matters. ‘’Proper’’ according to the wishes of the people who inhabit the god-forsaken town and who seem to have been created without something vital for any human being. show more Heart and soul.

Prepare for major distributions of anger on my part. Not because I didn’t like the novel. Obviously, I did. I loved it and more so because it created strong feelings in me. The most powerful of all being anger. But more on that later:) Petroleum is a depressing town that discriminates everyone and everything. Mary works as an embalmer in her father’s funeral parlour and many call her ‘’freak’’ because of her profession. Robert returns years after a tragic accident to look after his dying mother and the people behave as if he’s got the plague. Mary and Robert are two souls who struggle to stand for themselves in the midst of hatred, prejudice and hypocrisy.

One could say that there’s not much ‘’action’’ in the course of the story, that not many ‘’things’’ happen. I don’t believe that ‘’action’’ is always necessary for a novel to be interesting. I’m sure that daily life offers many secrets worthy of a story. For me, the most important thing while reading is feelings, the way the story and the characters make me react and this is where I return to my initial thoughts in this review. I felt a lot of anger. Anger towards a community that has no tolerance for what they cannot understand or forgive. Anger towards a father who cares nothing for his daughter’s happiness and plays the ‘’righteous’’ part while he’s pretty dishonest and cold-hearted. Anger towards Mary because she was a coward and in need of a shock to put some sense into her mind, since she was unable to do so herself.

Henderson structures the story around two themes, relationships and the sins of the past. The conflicts that lurk in the relationship between a parent and a child, between members of a community, between two people who love each other but people’s enmity keeps them apart. The writer successfully develops the issue of being unable to fully escape the past, a theme that is a favorite in Contemporary American Literature, and stresses the ‘’holier-than-thou’ attitude of the residents, the selfishness of a parent who fears loneliness and the bravery of the young generation to stand up for what is right. Robert has this strength, Mary has to find it.

The characters- whether we like them or not- are interesting and well-written for the purpose each one of them serves. I liked Robert, I found him courageous, down to earth, considerate to those who mattered and rather calm as a person. He coped with hostility in an assuring, albeit a bit too meek, way. Mary gave me quite a trouble, I confess. I did like her, but I wanted more. You’re thirty years old, why do you let everyone treat you as if you are a naive child? She has retained some rather distorted notions of familial and social obligations in her head. Her father was a man I deeply loathed. Am I too harsh? Possibly. I wanted him to vanish, to get the Hell out of Mary’s life in some way. I haven’t been so furious with a character in a while. The real jewel character, though, is Doris. The mysterious woman in the window…

I loved Henderson’s writing. It is direct and beautiful, the chapters are short, the narration is quick and never loses momentum. There was a certain kind of tenderness in the language, but no trace of melodrama and the dialogue was natural. It was hard for me to stop reading, I wanted to know how the story ended, how could Mary escape the suffocating environment in a place whose beauty was wasted in worthless, medieval notions of right and wrong.

I found this novel to be a more realistic depiction of the narrow-minded small communities than the quaint little towns with the quirky characters we’ve come to see lately. Don’t get me wrong, I love those stories, but here we have the raw, unforgiving story of highly unforgiving people….

Many thanks to Harper Perennial and Edelweiss for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. show less

Sometimes a book comes along that is just beautiful and moving and special. Susan Henderson's novel The Flicker of Old Dreams is one such novel. Set in the small, economically depressed western town of Petroleum, Montana, this is the story of a woman who has never fit in but has lived there all her life and a man who has returned to the town that drove him away years ago in order to be there for his dying mother. It is not a love story; it is a self-acceptance story. And it is heartbreaking show more and gorgeously rendered.

Mary is the embalmer in her father's funeral home. Her profession marks her out as strange in this rural farming community but she's been considered odd since her lonely, motherless childhood. Her painfully introverted, socially awkward personality hasn't made it any easier for her to fight against her outcast persona, at best ignored and at worst mocked. She's stayed in Petroleum helping her father but that was never her dream. Her dream, once upon a time, was to go to art school and become an artist. Now her only art is in preparing the people who come through the funeral home. The dead accept her ministrations, allowing her to feel an accepted part of things in ways that she hasn't since she was small. When she was a child, there was a terrible, tragic grain elevator accident at work where a boy on the verge of adulthood, a boy who was a star athlete, a boy who embodied everything that the town wanted to celebrate, died horribly. His younger brother Robert was with him at the time and town lore has it that it is he who caused the accident, or at least deserved the blame. Although still a teenager himself, Robert left town after his brother's death. In the aftermath of the accident, the other children allowed Mary, as the daughter of the undertaker, to reenact the tragedy with them, giving her a brief taste of acceptance that soon faded away. It is only when Robert reappears in town to spend his mother's last days with her and facing the scorn and anger of the unforgiving and downtrodden who blame him for the accident and the subsequent closure of the granary, that Mary realizes the cruelty and insularity of a town sitting in judgement, a town that has been only marginally kinder to her through the years.

Both Mary and Robert have been rejected by the people of the town so it is not perhaps unlikely that they should find each other, tapping a place in each other's soul that no one else in Petroleum has ever bothered to touch. Mary narrates the novel, infusing her narration with all the loneliness in her. Her life echoes with sadness and exclusion and Robert brings a measure of understanding with him when he returns home. When Mary must go against her father's long-settled plans, plans that don't take into consideration Robert or his mother's needs and wants but instead the town's wants, she finds a measure of courage and self and rightness that she has never tried to use before.

Henderson doesn't tie things up neatly. Mary fails Robert and herself multiple times even as she knows she's failing. She is drawn as knowing her flaws, her inability to communicate, her outsider status, but is unable to change, and definitely not as quickly as she might have wanted. She is a thoughtful narrator and the quiet resurrection of her dreams comes only haltingly. In Petroleum and in Mary, Henderson evokes a town hopeless with defeat and a main character who might just find her way out and away from the desperate rigidity and angry lashing out that this hopelessness has created. The writing is gorgeous and almost elegiac feeling even while it acknowledges the wrongs the town has done to Mary and to Robert and the quiet desperation that pervades many of its inhabitants' lives. This is very much a story of relationship and its lack, of the sins of the past carried forward in perpetuity, and the slow breaking away from forever acquiescing to what others think and want. It is a beautiful but realistic obituary for a place fading away, slowly and painfully, and the people who are forever marked by that place and its history but who finally need a life lived in wider opportunity, in greater acceptance, and in understanding. show less

A beautifully written book examining how death affects the residents of a small western town especially after a tragedy occurs to a young boy. The story is told from the point of view of a middle aged woman working in her father's funeral home as the embalmer. She has come to realize she is more comfortable around the dead than around the living and although her thorough description of the work she does might seem morbid, it in fact shows her reverence for the processes of the body that show more occur after death that will happen to everyone. She begins to see herself apart from this work and with an expanded awareness of her need to explore the world when she becomes involved with a man who comes back to town to be with his dying mother but who must deal with the anger of most of the residents for his role in the earlier tragedy. show less

The Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson is a very highly recommended lyrical novel about small town outsiders, prejudices, and expectations.

Petroleum, Montana, population 182, is a very small, dying town. It has been in decline for twenty years, ever since the accident that took the life of a local high schooler and shut down the grain elevator, the town’s main source of employment. The younger brother of the victim was blamed for his death and sent to live with relatives.

Mary show more Crampton has lived in Petroleum for thirty years, her whole life, and during those years she has always been a social outcast. Perhaps it is because her father owns the mortuary, or because she grew up without a mother, but Mary has never belonged. Now that she is the embalmer for her father, she is even more set apart from the townspeople around her. She had dreamed of becoming an artist, but now she finds satisfaction in her job, trying to capture the essence of a subject’s life.

When Robert Golden, the brother who has been blamed for the town's demise for years, returns to care for his dying mother, old resentments and condemnations return and are all directed at him. In Robert, Mary finds an unexpected soulmate who is also an outsider. Neither Robert nor Mary conform to the expectations of the towns citizens, but Mary's burgeoning friendship and relationship with him shock and dismay the town, while Robert's presence evokes anger and acting out.

The Flicker of Old Dreams is an exquisite, beautifully written, memorable novel. In fact, it is hard to comment on such a well-written novel that seems to capture the very heart and soul of two lonely people who have been considered pariahs by the town, yet are still expected to conform to the will and expectations set by the same people. These are finely detailed, well-developed, and wonderfully crafted characters. The town itself becomes a character, as the inhabitants seem to act as one.

Henderson has created an unforgettable character in Mary - heartbreaking and so tender, caring and loyal to her father and their dying town, even as it sucks the life right out of her. Anyone who has ever lived as an outsider in a small narrow minded town or in a family of the same ilk will understand Mary's untenable position, where she can never be a part of the town and, really, must find the way to escape in order to truly live her life. Her father, and the town, expect so much from her, mostly to live up to their expectations, and yet give so little in return. The ending is perfect, presenting redemption and hope.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/03/the-flicker-of-old-dreams.html show less