YEARS OF EDEN

A beautifully written story which recalls The Yearling and concerns the growing up of Zenas Fairbanks. Beginning on a farm in Michigan, before the first World War, this has a rural setting for the most part. When Zenas is five, his mother dies, his father Lin goes to work in a factory, and the boy goes to live with his grandmother. A darkly thinking, superstitious Irish woman, she inhibits Zenas and instills a fear of the universe in him. But he shakes off her Irish brooding whenever he goes off on jaunts. There is the time in the woods when he meets Turk fishing- and later Turk's angel wife; or the time he spends his birthday in town- with his father and the waitress, Belle, at an amusement park. And there is also the rain, snow, the farm animals, the woods, the swamp, the characterization of the town fop, the description of a Klan get-together....Occasionally brilliant, and with some of the lyricism of Goyen's House of Breath, this is poetic, rich.