Goodnight, Nebraska

by Tom McNeal

Book Overview

At the age of 17, Randall Hunsacker shoots his mother's boyfriend, steals a car and comes close to killing himself. His second chance lies in a small Nebraska farm town, where the landmarks include McKibben's Mobil Station, Frmka's Superette, and a sign that says The Wages of Sin is Hell. This is Goodnight, a place so ingrown and provincial that Randall calls it "Sludgeville"-until he starts thinking of it as home. In this pitch-perfect novel, Tom...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375704299
• ISBN13: 9780375704291
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

growing up and love on the plains of modern-day Nebraska

The treeless, rolling terrain of Nebraska's panhandle and an isolated small town are the setting for this novel, and the uncompromising harsh beauty of this landscape provides an environment for characters whose lives depend much on the ability to withstand solitude and isolation. Randall, the young protagonist, contracts into a self-protective stoniness as he fetches up here on his own like a shipwreck victim. Marcy, the girl who becomes his sweetheart, strives for a hard-won personal independence from her hard-working farmer parents. Their late-night lovemaking and eventual marriage are an against-all-odds attempt to save themselves from being swallowed up by the indifference of the natural world and the conventional expectations of the small town world they inhabit.What pleased me most about this book was how often it took unexpected turns. Given the explosiveness of young Randall's character, his insensitiviy, and his distrust of others, his growth to manhood, steady and responsible, is a welcome surprise. So is his loyalty to Marcy and his willingness to regard her as an equal in love and marriage, even letting her leave him for an adventure of her own in California. Her discovery of him asleep in his pickup, parked in the driveway at her apartment house, the smell of rural Nebraska still filling the cab, is a wonderful moment of the bond that holds them together and to their home. Another long sequence in the novel describes a hunting party that grows progressively unnerving, as some of the more trigger-happy in the group get steadily drunker and more frustrated at the lack of game. There is an ominous threat of trouble as you follow them, page after page, and McNeal waits until much later in the novel to reveal the eventual dark deeds of the day, throwing Randall's future unexpectedly into question for a time. I think this book compares well with Kent Haruf's better known novel "Plain Song." The landscape and setting are very similar; so are the themes and the evocative language; and the rural and small-town characters are drawn with equal depth, compassion, and psychological realism. I recommend both.

Stunning Debut

This book moved me. Its characters leapt off the page and into my life. This author has a way with words. The writing style is vivid and the character development incredible. I could not wait to read this book when I woke up in the morning and struggled to put it down each day. I recommend this book to everyone -- it is a true marvel and a stunning debut. I cannot wait for his next book.

Great selection for Reading Groups & Book Clubs.

"Goodnight" demands the reader engage with the book at every level. The characters are vital, flawed and at times immoral. They are so well-conceived that it compels the reader to make judgments about acceptance and forgiveness. The story goes well beneath the surface of each character and exposes the depths of this fictional town with surprise, wit and heartbreaking revelation. At the end of the story, when the reader realizes the remaining truth, it is a well earned triumph. This was a Book Club selection and it provoked great discussion among the members because the author, Tom McNeal, pushes the story without spoonfeeding the reader. The writing is sparse and beautiful. The characters are unforgettable. The setting of Goodnight is as deceptive as the flat Nebraska plains. Wonderful.

Second Chance in the Sandhills:review of Goodnight, Nebraska

Many of us will recognize the fictional town of Goodnight, located in the Nebraska panhandle somewhere between Chadron and Rushville near the Niobrara River. We grew up in, or have close ties to, a place just like it - some small town where the main forms of entertainment are the Friday night high school football games and pheasant hunting, and where folks get curious if you happen to be going down the street in a different direction than usual. Goodnight is where 17 year-old Randall Hunsacker is sent after his life turns wrong in Provo, Utah. Randall has two things going for him: he's a helluva free safety and a hard- working auto mechanic. And then Marcy Lockhardt, the most popular cheerleader, starts to pay him some attention. This novel is Randall's story, but it's also the story of a variety of people from the town, most notably the staid and successful farmer and his bored and disillusioned wife, who become Randall's in-laws. McNeal draws the setting and characters without ever hitting a wrong note. (The football game scene should draw chuckles of familiarity from small town natives.) And the more we come to know these people, the more we see a striking contrast emerge between the men, who find an anchor in routine, and the women, who long for a release from the monotony. McNeal examines his characters' weak spots. As Randall tells his wife, the weak spots are what define us. When that spot gets pushed and everything else about you falls away, what's left is who you are.

"When people said Nebraska, I always thought flat..."

Says the FBI agent investigating a murder on the Pine Ridge. He continues, "But you see, it's not flat at all." That's my reaction to this wonderful book. This book has the long view, eyepopping, like the sky overhead, and it has its shorts, up, down again, unexpected. I don't get some other comments as I read them here online. One says McNeal can't draw characters, that these are too broad...I can't believe it! I never cry when I read a book and I found myself crying several times during this novel, not because McNeal was ever melodramatic, or pulling my emotional strings, but because so many of the details were so right! Reactions to grief, reactions to the stark facts of death, reactions to love and attraction and fear, and gossip...I don't care what time people have to leave to get to the football game in Lincoln and that would probably be one detail that might matter to a Nebraskan, but I am one, and I was past caring. This is a real book, by someone I suspect is a very keen and caring listener, so generous it made my heart swell when he wrote so truely, and compassionately; it made me question my own reactions to the rural people I've known in my life, and judged. One reviewer here says that these kind of events would take generations; what do we have in the twisting evolution of characters' lives but those very generations? Those incidents can and do happen and I know they do because I've lived them. To those who say this is not a novel, I say shame on you, especially if you are a writer. This book clearly follows the fates of Randall and Marcy, and if you don't realize how other characters come along for the ride in life, then you are not living. This novel is more real than most I've read in a long time....why? Because the writer knows that time is not always as linear as we want it to be, even as Lewis wants it to be, looking at the barest outline of Randall's life to that moment; we want to think so, but thinking so is only one element that is the downfall of Lewis's own marriage. The shifting points-of-view show McNeal's compassion and his feeling, his genuine concern for his characters. No one in a small town really wants to know what a person feels inside, they want to know the plots and the incidents, hungry for tragedy and perversion, at times even making up what can't be known. In the face of the deepest secrets, the deepest tragedies, however, there is a spirit which rises over all of it, maybe the luckiest of us could call it grace. Tom McNeal write with a great deal of grace. I read this book with two boys crawling all over me. I took breaks only to feed them, to cuddle or answer their barest needs, and once in a while, I looked over the pages to relish the love and joy I feel for them. This book prompts that kind of reflectiveness. It also kept pulling me right along. It may not be a typically plotted story, but it is the BEST I've read in quite a while. You don't have to k