Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

Book Overview

When Gabriel Lynch moves with his mother and brother from a brownstone in Baltimore to a dirt-floor hovel on a homestead in Kansas, he is not pleased. He does not dislike his new stepfather, a former... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385498144
• ISBN13: 9780385498142
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 291 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Many Levels, Many Reasons

Pretty much all the reviewers so far have loved this book. There's just one guy who dissented, but I guess there's always gonna be one that doesn't catch on. For my part, I'd like to join in the chorus of enthusiasm for this novel. It works, and it works on many levels. At the simplest level it's an adventure story. Woven into that is a coming of age tale. Layered on that is a dialogue between good and evil, between the best and worst in men's natures. Add the back and forth between the life of homesteaders and that of cowboys, two dual and sometimes dueling aspects of the American frontier experience. There's a young black man discovering the natural world and relating to it in a way I've never seen in African-American literature. There's the turmoil of a mother watching her young sons become men, for better and worse. There's the anguish of a man who's family has died tragically. There's the strange legacy of slavery as manifest through two characters who don't even understand how they fit into that tragedy.All this and more can be found in this exceptional novel. I guess not everyone will engage with it so completely, but if any of these themes sound interesting to you I encourage you to delve into this book. It's all there, and an attentive reader will be well rewarded.

Western with heart (and punch)

Attention, readers who admire Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry take heart. Another young literary mind has entered the fray with a suspenseful and intelligent take on the long-ago American West. In his debut novel Durham has managed to create a nearly flawless work, not bad for a young fella. Has he roamed the llano and arroyo on horseback himself? If not, then my hat is off to his realistic portrayal of the trials of life in the saddle. I could have done without the moralistic Christian trappings, but so were the times resigned to life's cruelties.Blood Meridian take heed, another compadre in innocence has hit the trail with gruesome desperados.

The prodigal son returns

The prodigal son always comes home. Iin life, in parable and in literature.And he has returned once more in "Gabriel's Story," a haunting debut by David Anthony Durham. In this incarnation, the wayward youth is a 15-year-old African-American boy in the empty middle of a continent, caught between youth and manhood, naiveté and wisdom, family and flight. Fleeing racism in Reconstruction-era Baltimore, Gabriel Lynch travels with his mother and younger brother to his stepfather's hard-scrabble homestead in 1870s Kansas. As with the Biblical story of the prodigal son, Gabriel finds the "outside" world less exciting and more threatening than he dreamed. He returns to Kansas wiser and chastened, prepared to take his place behind the plow and, more importantly, at the family hearth. "Gabriel's Story" is a classical bildungsroman -- a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character -- told in masterful prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy.His is not just a startlingly poetic African-American voice (Durham is the son of Trinidadian immigrants), but a welcome new voice in the rich spectrum of American letters, where authors should -- and must -- be judged in different shades of black and white: The color of words on a page.

An awesome debut

This is a coming-of-age story with elements of All the Pretty Horses and Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." There are no two dimensional characters in this story. It's a fully fleshed out story of good and evil and all the subtleties in between. Gabriel's Story will grab a hold of you and not let go until the last page. There is violence, but it is not the shoot-'em-up brand. It's a visceral ultra real violence that you may want to shield your eyes from, but like Gabriel, you're a witness and have to live with the evil acts that humans act out upon each other. I'm tempted to say that this is a damn fine first novel, but it would be a first rate novel, whether it was Durham's first or fifth. He is a brilliant writer, able to portray both the beauty and harsh ugliness that composes the world we reside in.

Altogether a really good novel.

I picked up this book after reading the USA Today review, which was essentially an unconditional rave. I decided to give it a try, but figured I'd probably be disappointed, as few books live up to the praise heaped on them. But GABRIEL'S STORY was a pleasant surprise. It begins with vivid homesteading scenes - all the toil and the poverty of it. Makes me glad I wasn't a homesteader, and it made it reasonable that Gabriel would want to run away from it. The journey that he sets off on is truly engrossing, well-plotted, with beautiful language and great descriptions of the Western landscape. It looks like the novel is being compared to Cormac McCarthy's work. There are some similarities, but GABRIEL'S STORY is a bit more hopeful than McCarthy's work. The world is still harsh and dangerous, but Durham seems to have more faith in humanity, in family and friends. Also, I thought it was interesting that the reviewer in USA Today said that he was a city-dwelling white guy that still got into this book about a black boy in another century out on the plains. I felt the same way. Yes, the main characters are black, but their racial identity is only part of the whole world of the story. They're black like James Joyce's characters are Irish or Faulkner's are Southern - it matters, but it doesn't change the fact that anybody can connect with them. Altogether a really good novel.