BEN STEMPTON'S BOY

In this novel, a wandering orphan from Pittsburgh meets a man and his family in Georgia and gets drawn into their complicated emotional lives.

In the early 1970s, Randy Walls turns 18 years old and is on his own—he’s lived his whole life in Pittsburgh, first in an orphanage and then in foster homes. He travels to Georgia in search of his only living relative, Uncle Oscar. But, it turns out, Oscar’s not actually alive, leaving Randy stranded “like a lost dog dragging a broken leash,” one of the many memorable turns of phrase in Yates’ family drama. Randy fortuitously meets Ben Stempton, a cantankerous older man who immediately hires him to haul pulpwood, with a shack to live in part of the deal. Randy falls in love with Ben’s daughter, Stacy, but she is seeing Ty Ragsdale, a “violence prone high school dropout who really didn’t give a damn” as well as the principal obstacle to the protagonist’s happiness. After Ben suddenly dies in a freak accident, Stacy is devastated, as is her mom, Bea, and Randy decides to stay on for a while. Yates paints an authentic picture of the Georgia countryside in the ’70s, still riven by febrile racism. In addition, Randy is a grippingly complex character—fundamentally decent but also tortured by the nightmarish memories of the abuse he suffered as a child. The author’s prose can be sentimentally earnest but also sweetly poetic: “There was something about Stacy’s eyes that seemed basic to life, and when Randy closed his he could see hers.” The plot drags on a bit, made lumbering by an excess of details—far too many pages are devoted to Ty’s backstory and other matters. Overall, the novel would likely improve if 100 pages were artfully excised. Nonetheless, this is a powerful story, both thoughtful and affecting.

A moving family tale as touching as it is historically perceptive.