The Book of Hard Things: A Novel
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 0374115591 / Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2003
Cuzzy Gage, a small-town boy living in a dead-end, poverty-stricken town, meets Tracy Edwards, an ethnomusicologist hoping to chronicle the life of his friend, and the two strangers bond while sifting through the deceased man's papers.
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A provocative first novel that explores the porous borders between friendship, sex and loveAt eighteen, Cuzzy Gage has never been out of Poverty, the isolated mountain hamlet where he was born, raised, and--much to the annoyance of his dreamy girlfriend, the mother of his child--seems destined to stay. He is content to hang out and just get by; it's as if ambition hasn't occurred to him. Enter Tracy Edwards, who has come to the area after the death of his close friend, Algernon Black, an ethnomusicologist who specialized in initiation rituals. It's to Black's family estate, the Larches, that Tracy retreats, in grief and confusion, after his friend's death, to archive Algie's work. Through a set of circumstances that look like chance but turn out to be something else entirely, Tracy hires Cuzzy to help sort through Algie's papers. So begins a quiet and ambivalent relationship, one that eventually causes both young men to admit their own histories and to start to rethink the future. As Tracy introduces Cuzzy to poetry and literature and music, he in turn is exposed to the natural world, to a place of granite and schist and other, enduring, hard things. But in a small town their unlikely friendship is inevitably the focus of scrutiny and debate, a debate that ends as no one could have imagined, and makes each of them, in their own way, confront the hardest thing of all. Poetic and compelling, The Book of Hard Things is a bold fiction debut.
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