Faraway Places

by Tom Spanbauer

Book Overview

During a fateful summer, 13-year-old Jake Weber witnesses the brutal murder of a Native American woman by the town banker. Jake's parents forbid him to speak of the killing or name its perpetrator, even as the woman's African American lover stands falsely accused. The crime and what follows it forever alter Jake's view of his parents and the world around him. Faraway Places won widespread praise for its vivid narrative and incantatory style, and Spanbauer...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0976631180
• ISBN13: 9780976631187
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Hawthorne Books
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Where Tom began

I first read Spanbauer's MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MOON 10 years ago and fell in love with him, especially his unique voice. Recently, to prepare to take his famous "Dangerous Writing" workshop, I ordered FARAWAY PLACES, his first novel, really a novella, reissued in a gorgeous edition. The story explores themes of racism, rural poverty, identity, and family-imposed secrets and shame. Like all four of his novels, the central character is an outsider in plain site, in this case, an Idaho farm near Pocatello... which is similar to all of Tom's novels, except THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE... There are echoes of Steinbeck in the elegiac relationship to a changing rural landscape, the reverence for nature. Characters are sharply drawn, and Tom crafts sentences like sacred objects. This first novel only begins to hint at the scale of Spanbauer's narrative ambitions, realized successively in the three novels that follow, all of which are more complex, more panoramic in scope. But thematically and stylistically, this is where it begins. Highly recommended. In the context of the contemporary struggle over race in American life, this brings us back to the brutal reality of our history, which is pretty strong medicine, as well.

A Moving Coming Of Age Novel

In Tom Spanbauer's short first novel, the narrator is Jacob Joseph Weber who is thirteen and enters junior high about half way through the story. He and his parents live on a farm in Wind River, Idaho, a farm that the evil Harold Endicott , holder of the mortgage on their land, forecloses on in October of the year (early 1950's?)after the Chinook ("the name for the strangae wind blowing") struck in February. The Weber family's life is grim as they are fettered by both poverty and the shackles of a severe Catholic Church; they are not nearly as bad off, however, as "that woman Sugar Babe," an Indian woman and the black man who lives with her. While Spanbauer notifies the reader early on, through the voice of Jacob, as to the multiple tragedies that happen, the narrator, as you would expect from a youngster recalling such events, skips from here to there until his story is finally told. Jacob is a youngster grappling with his budding sexuality-- he nightly "yellows" his shorts and of course has to confess his sins to "Monsignor Canby about every occasion." His transgressions, however, are miniscule compared to the violence and evil, even murder, that he confronts at such an early age. One of my favorite passages is Jacob's account of his family's going to the state fair when every year his parents picked that day to be mad at each other--"be mad and stay mad. . . What got different when my mother and my father were mad at each other was the world; everything and everybody else was a little off--a touch cantankerous, and full of bother. . . Everybody drove like they were from Utah." Surely every child has experienced something similar when his parents are angry with each other. FARAWAY PLACES-- the title comes from a Perry Como song-- is extremely well-written with not one wasted word, a harbinger of what is to come from this fine writer.

Nothing is what it seems to be. . .

This book is for just about any only child growing up in the 1950s on a small farm in the middle of nowhere. It captures the inner world of a boy entering adolescence, with a strong religious upbringing, no extended family or friends, four miles from the road to town, with nothing but a drying-up river running nearby and flat land in all directions. Jacob, the central character of this short novel, spends his days alone with his wondering mind and vivid imagination, poised between his dreamy mother and his rough father. As if to fill the void of the family's routine, isolated existence, in which a trip to the Idaho state fair is a highlight of the year, an intense and violent melodrama unfolds around them and draws them all into its vortex.The title is from a Perry Como recording of the period, and that softly romantic song and singer represent the untroubled surface of a time marked also by McCarthyism, racism, and social hypocrisy. Spanbauer pulls out all the stops as his young hero discovers both the fierce ugliness and the hidden beauty beneath his schoolboy illusions. In the end, after bloody fistfights, hard drinking, domestic abuse, bestiality, killings, a lynching, and arson, a very different song, the Ventures' rock and roll classic "Walk, Don't Run" is playing loudly on a car radio. Finally, the reader is left to wonder how much this coming-of-age story is itself an illusion filling the fevered imagination of a lonely farm boy. I recommend this one for anyone who believes that nothing is what it seems to be.

A minor masterpiece

"Faraway Places" is an excellent introduction to the novels of Tom Spanbauer, author of "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon" and "City of Shy Hunters," the first of which is a bonafide classic and the second a grand failure. "Faraway Places" is a much shorter work than either of these, and its economy of style may surprise fans of Spanbauer's later books. However, there is a treasure-trove of riches crammed into its 124 pages, not the least of which is the poetic quality of its prose. "Faraway" is the coming-of-age story of Jacob Joseph Weber, a thirteen-year old who, once he witnesses a murder, finds out that the world is a much different place from the one his father has imagined for him, on their lonely Idaho farm. It is a story of violence and betrayal, but it is also the story of forbidden passion and the possibility of something beyond the mundane reality of day-to-day existence. It is also the story of incredible loss: "I would have liked to have slept and dreamed dreams with Geronimo. But he was already too far away." This is a novel rife with metaphor and symbolism that rewards rereading. You may understand Jacob, or Haji Baba, as he renames himself, better once you've read Spanbauer's other two novels, but "Faraway Places" stands on its own as a brilliant indictment of a time (the 1950s) and a place (the American Heartland) and of a self-serving philosophy that, ultimately, is built on a lie. "Everything is an illusion," Mr. Energy tells Jacob, in the course of an eventful trip to the Blackfoot State Fair. But it's the reality that cuts to the quick of Jacob's heart.

Lovely!

Jacob Joseph Weber is 13 years old, and his eyes are seeing things in ways he's never seen them before. In 125 pages, Spanbauer tells the story of Jake's journey from boyhood to manhood in a time and place where being a man seems to mean making all the right mistakes. Jake sees truth in places his father no longer can, but in the process of opening his own eyes, he may be helping his father see, as well. See the cruelty of his assumptions, the reality behind the illusions that are all around."It was all an illusion, like Mr. Energy, that magician at the Blackfoot State Fair, said. Everything was an illusion according to him. I used to get scared at night just thinking about it: what if everything -- everything that was familiar to me, everything I knew -- was an illusion and what I was really doing was hanging in thin air, like the earth was hanging in thin air, like I could see the moon hanging up there in the sky, a round ball just out there with nothing solid to hold it in place." (p. 13)This is Spanbauer's first novel and is a lovely introduction to his writing, his mind, and his style. It's a quick read without some of the difficulties of "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," but still an elegant look at a moment in a boy's life when he shrugs off the cloak of childhood and does what comes next. Rumor around Portland has it that this book will be re-issued later this year.