Inland

by K.C. Frederick

Winner of 2007 PEN-Winship Award for Best Novel This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157962135X
• ISBN13: 9781579621353
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Permanent Press (NY)
• Length: 269 Pages

Customer Reviews

Required reading for Boomers!

We who were grade-school kids in the 1950s lived in a sunny-side-up world with a dark, queasy underbelly. We had Lassie and Looney Tunes, and we had fallout shelters and air-raid drills where we crouched under our desks and hid our heads. On the one hand, the future was so bright you had to squint; on the other, we were told that the world and everything in it might be vaporized at any moment. We were too young to understand the contradictory messages or to analyze the post-war paranoia of the Cold War, but it was everywhere around us and informed our lives. When Krushchev pounded the podium with his shoe and said he'd bury us, we took it literally. INLAND tells the story of people who were not quite a generation ahead of us, but who were the age we would be when Woodstock and the 60s happened. These skillfully drawn portraits of the inhabitants of a midwestern college campus show us that the social, sexual and political revolution had already begun; indeed, that we who were of college age in the latter 60s owe a big debt to our immediate predecessors. To see the era and its uneasy components through the eyes of young adults a lot like the ones we were going to become gives us a valuable vicarious view of the mysterious, complicated 50s. Frederick's writing in this book gathers momentum and high-calorie efficiency in a wonderfully ominous way as we're carried toward the denouement.

the troubled soul of a decade........

This wonderful novel evokes the decade of the `50s, which those of us who lived it remember as a curious mix of favor and fear, the boom and the Bomb. Its central figure is a graduate student at an unnamed midwestern campus. It opens with the offhand proffer of a CIA job. Although Ted Riley does not pursue the latter, its implications dog his steps. There is the unfolding story of a library assistant Andrew Kessler, a refugee with a mysterious past, and there is the bright presence of Dori, Ted's lover. Their stories are deftly interwoven. Among indelible scenes: a graphically described homosexual encounter in a campus washroom; an ambiguous meeting between Ted and his long-lost father, newly wealthy, and bringing devastating news. Frederick renders with precision both the weather in the streets and the weather in the souls of his characters.

Cradle for the new Rome: INLAND, by K. C. Frederick

On a midwest campus at the end of the Eisenhower era, with Sputnik tracing potential atom bomb trajectories, and racial repression digging in, a young man and young woman prepare to inherit their generation's America. Awkwardly engaging them, a displaced Polish man, a gay intellectual with his own untranslatable difficulties, but a long history, has perspective on the emerging New Rome. The action has a discreet background of US intelligence employing assets at the university. Dori Green is drawn by the rising spirit of the coming JFK years and the civil rights actions beginning in the South. Ted Riley won't be able to hang on to Dori if he stays in Chippewa to trudge on for the PhD. The Pole Andrew Kesler finds he must depart; but why the 16th century carved crucifix that he, an unbeliever, takes care to leave for Ted? There are well-painted scenes of a midwest college town passing through the weather of 1959, with observations of the English department, the rare birds on library staff, make-do student apartments, dens to drink and dine, a big party with visiting writer falling drunk down the stairs. And finally, a climax with kick enough for peroration. I found INLAND worth two reads: one for story and another for perception and language. As in: Ted and his father assessing each other in speech and silence after a 14-year abandonment. A powerful personality appears and is gone. Frederick is tagged as a "writer's writer" but I find him a reader's writer too. Five stars.

Sharp Angles: Inland, by K. C. Frederick

In K. C. Frederick's new novel, Inland, we meet an American grad student, Ted Riley, and Andrew Kesler, a Polish immigrant, each dragging his history into the present and forward into the future. Though there are loved women (a sister, an almost-fiancée, a present-tense lover), it seems to me that the central relationships are among the men: events challenge them to respond to one another in unexpected ways, and as the scenes unfold, we - as well as the characters in the novels - are surprised. Frederick's earlier fictions also give us engaging pairs of men: Petir and Pund inhabit Country of Memory (1998), Jory and Vaniok appear in The 14th Day (2000), Stivan and Leni are part of the population of Accomplices (2003); their relationships, sometimes oppressive or invasive, sometimes salutary, and always different, unfold in imagined landscapes at once familiar and mythic. Set in the heartland in a town called Chippewa, Inland `s jagged encounters return us to the `50s: we find ourselves on a university campus where the Cold War, like fine mist, touches everything But this is a mist that does not obscure: it renders angles sharp as the ones in black-and-white photographs of those days. Inland, the times are rendered with an ease that belies their artfulness. Human nature, its variants and its constants, is the stuff of Frederick's fiction. Its moods are elegiac, often haunting, and beautiful. I recommend this terrific book!