Hard Rain Falling

Wanting is not the same as having; having is not the same as making.

You can love and love, never saying the word, never getting eye-to-eye with the core of your need and gift, and be no closer to the beloved than bodies can get. Only children can be utterly consuming love objects, though far too often they aren't. And lovers? Far too scary to love unguardedly, I think, but most don't even get near to the guardrails before swerving back to the middle of the road.

It's the carnage from their fear-driven lurches that takes out the innocent bystanders. That's what this story is: The record of Jack's fear-driven, rage-fueled lurchings back and forth as love ungiven, ungivable, rots him from within, taking an agonizingly slow time to finish show more its dreadful work.

A dark and terrible story about a life unlived, only sweated out. show less

Orphan, street urchin, poolhall haunt, prisoner, parking attendant, drunkard, a divorced father with anger issues. The story of Jack Levitt is the story of a life unlived. An insufferable man who blames his lack of ambition and talent on his surroundings and his circumstances. To some extent, he's right. Getting forgotten and left to rot in solitary as a teenager will do a number on your mental health for the rest of your life. There's a part of me that sympathizes with his struggles. And yet, his actions and outlook on the world do him no favors. Despite all of his self-reflections and philosophical musings, he is an ugly brute of a man; and he knows it.

Carpenter's writing is the highlight of this crime/noir novel. It's clear, show more precise, no-nonsense stuff; you'll find no flamboyancy here. Yet his prose makes Hard Rain Falling so readable and engaging, especially since Carpenter has a propensity for capturing emotions. I much appreciated the momentary glimpses of ironic humor that he slips in every now and then: a relief after so much dark material.

Hard Rain Falling left me feeling depressed, cold, and afflicted with a sort of malaise. Part of this was expected. Jack's life is grim, and even when events take a turn for the better he insists on getting in his own way. Part of that was also because of the unnecessary ending that I felt fought against most of the rest of Jack's story.

I'll admit that I'm still getting my feet underneath me with this genre of fiction, so I don't have the most say. Even so, this is high on my re-read list. It has an amazing opening hundred pages, and a tenderness in some of the relationships lurks under the violence and neglect. show less

Some novels hit home hard, they make their reading so uncomfortable we avert our eyes from the page, hoping the characters won't make the same foolish mistakes we once made. We cringe, like we might upon looking at a faded Polaroid from our awkward adolescence. Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling, back in print since September 2009, thanks to NYRB Classics (muchos gracias, NYRB!!) is one such novel for me.

Jack Leavitt, an inadvertent anti-hero extraordinaire as anti-heroic as Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle (sans psychosis) has recently run away from an orphanage. He's seventeen and just been locked out of his dirt bag motel room. It's already dusk when we meet him, and only going to get darker.

We know both his parents are deceased from the show more stark prologue to this, Don Carpenter's first published book, circa 1966. Jack's Dad got kicked in the head by a horse: dead at twenty-six. His Mom died more violently a short time later by her own hand: shotgun blast to the head. Their violent deaths are poetically apropos of the violence and emotional chaos awaiting Jack's impending adult life.

The novel is a merciless marvel of writing. As readers we are eyewitnesses to a lifetime of pain and loss in the character of Jack Leavitt: the boy whom fate abandoned, the adolescent who was understandably wounded and proceeded to make heart wrenchingly poor decisions for which he would pay the consequences the rest of his traumatized life. If Hard Rain Falling were not so gorgeously crafted, it would indeed be impossibly hard to read.

If you're like me, you've probably known some Jack Leavitts or were perhaps a Jack Leavitt yourself. A pool hall punk, drunk most days, broke in more ways than one. Unemployed, Jack is forced to crash in pads, cars, derelict tenements. In Jack's harsh Portland backstreets, there's no Payday Loans or parents to bail him out. No family or friends, except his Minnesota Fats-wannabe pool hustling buddy, Billy Lancing, and fellow-whorehouse-aficionado, Denny Mellon. Jack "was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense 'wanted'. He did not feel 'wanted'—he felt very unwanted.".

What does an unwanted and undisciplined teen out on his own for the first time in life do without adult supervision? He ''just wanted some money...a piece of ass...a big dinner...a bottle of whiskey...a car...some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes...a .45 automatic...a record player...so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to 'How High the Moon'...''.

What he does instead is wash dirty dishes at a cheap dive. Since he has no money after rent for the finer things in life, he fails to find that piece of ass or piece of mind. What he does is place bets in pool halls he can't pay. Becomes a Cadillac thief, break-and-enters a middle class house that seems "like a mansion" after the orphanage dump he escaped from. What he does lands him in jail, surprise surprise.

Unsurprisingly, Jack is duped by a seemingly sympathetic district attorney who gave him his word that he would take his rough upbringing into account and give him a good deal: Probation, time served. The lawyer never said a word about San Quentin! Screwed by the System yet again, how could Jack have trusted the System to finally do him right? Because he wanted to believe the System, the only pathetic parents he'd ever had, would finally take proper care of him. Nope.

In prison, Jack develops what most people learn naturally by growing up cared for—loved—when they're taught the wisdom of sacrifice, of self-discipline and self-control. Jack will eventually master his impulsiveness, so that he can experience genuine love toward a pool hustling buddy from his Portland past who becomes his cell mate, and who demonstrates to Jack the greatest love imaginable out in the prison yard one violent afternoon, but is it too late?

Don Carpenter pulverizes the then unspoken societal taboo of consensual inmate sex, as he sensitively and convincingly handles the reality, describing how the inmate's emotional and psychological survival are at stake; even among those who prior to prison were as promiscuously heterosexual as they come, nonetheless needed the sex in order to remain sane. It's like the inmates do it to keep from being reminded daily that their bodies are essentially graves. The guards look the other way because they know it makes the captives easier to control.

The love Jack learns about in prison unfortunately doesn't translate well upon his release. He marries an unscrupulous woman in a rush—a party-hearty girl, Sally—in Vegas, while he's on parole. She's the way Jack was prior to his prison sentence, undisciplined, narcissistic, out of control, the sad product of a different type of abuse than what Jack experienced altogether. In an ironic and twisted role reversal that spoke directly to the times, we see Jack think that having a baby with Sally will somehow miraculously cure their marriage's ills and her infidelity.

By the time this tragic novel ends, Carpenter's ruthless hard rain is still falling—Jack's deep and abiding loneliness is mired in the mud of all that rain. It is still his life's most faithful mate. show less

As for the true crime of his life, the crime of being born without parents, the crime of being physically strong and quick, the crime of not having a puritan conscience, the crime of existing in a society in which he and everybody else permitted crime without rising up un outrage: well, he was purely and perfectly guilty here, too, as was everybody else

Apart from being highly praised by Chris Offutt and George Pelecanos, being reprinted as a classic by the NYBR and having a stunning cover, what did I like about Hard Rain Falling? In short, pretty much everything. Easy to love but difficult to define, it’s been labelled as hard-boiled /crime, but that is misleading. It’s a book about the dispossessed.
Set in the West coast in the show more 50’s, Jack Levitt is raised in an orphanage and drifts and hustles his way through a life of petty crime, pool halls and dosshouses.
Jack nodded and drank some of his beer. He did not add that he had also bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid rooms, pretended the vacuum was freedom, wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream.

Intelligent and philosophical, it takes on some pithy tropes – race relations, crime, homosexuality, the penal system.
The idea of prison is punishment, any reforming done is strictly incidental. Society don’t give a fuck what happens to you, and you know it. Society is an animal, just like the rest of us

Jack’s attempts to be accepted invariably fail on every level. Written in cinematic prose, its unpretentious and unpredictable. I was in bits at the end, not because it’s a sentimental story, far from it, but because Jack’s destiny is truly devastating. show less

Hard Rain Falling - A clear, honest story of Jack Levitt, a young man abused and brutalized in his years growing up in an orphanage and, after running away to Portland, Oregon at age sixteen, living his hardscrabble life among his buddies and cheap whores, in and out of sleazy pool halls, cheap boarding houses, reform school and prison, lots of prison, all the while drinking whiskey and fist fighting his way through seething anger and rage.

Author Don Carpenter’s prose is so sharp and vibrant, I had the feeling of standing next to Jack every step of the way. I also got to know, up close and personal, a few other men and women in Jack’s life, like Billy, a teenage pool shark with yellow skin and kinky reddish-brown hair, young tough show more Denny who loves any kind of dangerous, illegal action and, last but hardly least, wild woman Sally. This is such a powerful novel, other than my own brief comments, I’ll stand aside and let the author’s words speak for themselves.

Although he had clear blue eyes and curly blonde hair, even at age seven Jack looked like a seasoned boxer. Here’s Jack on his experience at the orphanage – and no wonder he ran away as soon as he could:

“Because the children of the orphanage were taught, all week long every week of their lives, that the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, was purely a question of feeling: if it felt good, it was bad, if it felt bad, it was good. . . . And work, they were taught that work was good, especially hard work, and the harder the work the better it was, their bodies screaming to them that this was a lie, it was all a terrible, God-originated, filthy lie, a monstrous attempt to keep them from screaming out their rage and anguish and murdering the authorities.”

One night a reform school guard lines the boys up and accuses them of unnatural sex practices, then grabs one of the frightened kids around the neck. Jack lashes out at this injustice, fists first, nearly killing the guard, an action that lands him in a dark, isolated cell for over four months. And that’s dark as in completely black; no light for 126 days:

“The punishment cell was about seven feet long, four feet wide, and six feet high. The floor and walls were concrete, and there were no windows. In the iron door near the bottom was a slot through which he passed his slop can, and through which his food and water were delivered to him. They did not feed him every day, and because of that he had no way of knowing how much time had passed. . . . At times, all his senses deserted him, and he could not feel the coldness of the concrete or smell his excrement, and the small sounds he made and the sounds that filtered in through the door gradually dimmed, and he was left along inside his mind, without a past to envision, since his inner vision was gone, too, and without a future to dream, because there was nothing but this emptiness and himself.”

When Jack is in his early 20s, after stealing a car and breaking into a house of rich people away on vacation and being caught drunk in bed, he is sent to a county jail:

“The boredom of it all, the sameness, the constant noise and smell of the tank, were driving him crazy. The fact that he was in was driving him crazy. . . . They had no right to do this to me, or to anybody else. He hated them all. But was crazy to hate them. So he decided he was going crazy. It was a relief for him to go berserk at last: it was an act of pure rationality that had nothing to do with McHenry or the poor fool Mac was taking over the bumps. It was an expression of sanity, a howl of rage at a world that put men in county jails. Everything finally got to be too much and he let go of his passion.”

Jack in San Quentin prison, on his bunk, looking up at the stark white ceiling, reflecting on our constant itch for sexual pleasure and the reason he was born in the first place:

“It struck him with horrible force. His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage, because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten. Cold rage filled him, rage at his unknown parents, rage at the life he had been given, and for such trivial, stupid reasons!"

There's a lot of scenes where Jack Levitt talks, drinks, smokes and takes action with Billy, Denny, Sally and others, even reaching a point in his life where he reads Joyce and Faulkner, but day and night, and that's ever day and every night, Jack has to deal with his rage. Again, as honest and as clear a novel as you will ever read. show less

A spare, thoughtful book about people struggling to find a reason to live, learning about themselves and trying to fashion a life. The two main characters (Billy and Jack) are beautifully drawn - Billy in particular will haunt me. The way Carpenter captures the drives of the characters to fill gaps in themselves they can't even quite understand is so compelling - Billy's story of how he wound up in prison is breathtaking, as is the gradual unwinding of Jack's marriage. It's a very male book - the female characters are ciphers - but it's a stunning achievement nonetheless.

Written in 1966 and a bit of a stir at the time. It's hard to imagine how things were so different then in terms of values and shockability. Post-war, when the American Dream was happening, folks were getting ahead, life never looked better (for some).

But the then youth seemed to miss the relevance of it all, the depression was just a bad dream to their parents but to them it was meaningless. That's the pitch where this book starts, down where the rejects of the American Dream live. You could mistake this book for poverty porn but not for long.

It follows one boy, Jack, as he makes all the right mistakes to end up in San Quentin. But where it left that path was to follow him out of jail, into "adulthood". He meets a girl and they marry. show more the story follows his development, indeed you spend a lot of time in his head but not with self-indulgence, self-pity, or vanity. He wakes up to what he is and who he is and suddenly wants more out of life but is faced with the limitations that both society and he himself have imposed on him.

There were a couple of points where I could have easily stopped reading but there was always the hint that this could turn into something really good. And it does.

At the end I felt that I had read a "good" book as opposed to entertainment or escapism. I'd go so far as to say that this book has meaning. show less