charleslambert's review
4.0
This was a hard book to read, and that's not a complaint. It shares with Banner's even more wonderful short stories an unflinching, and unsentimental, attention to the sort of people that tend to get sidetracked by most fiction: low-income white blue-collar workers, caught between faith and indifference to faith, possessed by emotions they can't, or won't, handle, dealing with problems of sickness, and money, and cars that won't start, and marriages that won't quite work. The book examines the struggle a man has with his feelings for a nine-year-old boy. As a child himself, he was seduced by an older boy and the novel moves between the two stories, each casting light on the other and emphasising the complex and non-sensational aspects of a love that can neither be accepted nor denied. It's hard to read because it forces the reader to put to one side assumptions about evil - assumptions that Dave, the main character and a church goer, is seen to share. What we're left with is a sense that conventional morality isn't much help here. But then what is? What do we do with our need, and capacity, for love when its the 'wrong sort'? Sublimate it? Accept it? What kind of life can we lead? Banner doesn't know or doesn't tell us if he does It's as though the novel takes you to a place you recognise, then leaves you there to find your way home by yourself.
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