THE ROOT OF EVERYTHING & LIGHTNING

Two novellas poignantly examine characters who find comfort in their roots and find themselves drawn to the unknown.

Hess offers a pair of searching explorations of the push and pull of one’s origins. In The Root of Everything, set in the early 20th century, Richard leaves his native Germany over the objections of his father in order to follow his younger brother, Rolf, to the United States. They both find work at a lumberyard in Missouri, but when Rolf dies tragically on the job, Richard is devastated. Nevertheless, he starts his own business and a family, as well; his son, Cal, follows in his footsteps and runs a lumbering business and marries a woman named Josie. However, Cal is never quite happy with his life, and Josie is so miserable that she finally leaves him; their son, Stanford, who’s secretly gay, leaves for New York City to become a wealthy businessman; there, he has a relationship with a palm reader named Sam. In deeply affecting prose that’s characteristic of the entire book, Hess depicts Richard’s despair over his now scattered family: “Richard…covered his face, and with this sharp action, the dragon flies scattered as if this human grief had poisoned their air.” In the second novella, Lightning, Bud is born and raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but dreams of moving out west with his best friend, Jerky. After his father dies, a rich aunt offers him the opportunity to move to New York and ride horses, a passion of his, and it’s a possibility that is as tantalizing as it is frightening. Once again, the author’s writing is poetically subtle but impressively restrained; readers are drawn deep into these stories without any excessive hand-holding, free to draw their own conclusions. With impressive emotional power, both novellas show the paradoxical ways in which one’s family can feel like a prison from which to break free but also like a home in which one can find one’s true self.

A moving pair of historical tales, as philosophically astute as they are dramatically gripping.