The Flicker of Old Dreams

‘'This town wants you to be as it's always been and do as it's always done'', he says, ‘'but what if that's not what makes you happy?''

In this small community, which seems to have been stuck in time, being happy isn't important. It's not even desirable. Being ‘'proper'' is all that matters. ‘'Proper'' according to the wishes of the people who inhabit the god-forsaken town and who seem to have been created without something vital for any human being. Heart and soul.

Prepare for major distributions of anger on my part. Not because I didn't like the novel. Obviously, I did. I loved it and more so because it created strong feelings in me. The most powerful of all being anger. But more on that later:) Petroleum is a depressing town that discriminates everyone and everything. Mary works as an embalmer in her father's funeral parlour and many call her ‘'freak'' because of her profession. Robert returns years after a tragic accident to look after his dying mother and the people behave as if he's got the plague. Mary and Robert are two souls who struggle to stand for themselves in the midst of hatred, prejudice and hypocrisy.

One could say that there's not much ‘'action'' in the course of the story, that not many ‘'things'' happen. I don't believe that ‘'action'' is always necessary for a novel to be interesting. I'm sure that daily life offers many secrets worthy of a story. For me, the most important thing while reading is feelings, the way the story and the characters make me react and this is where I return to my initial thoughts in this review. I felt a lot of anger. Anger towards a community that has no tolerance for what they cannot understand or forgive. Anger towards a father who cares nothing for his daughter's happiness and plays the ‘'righteous'' part while he's pretty dishonest and cold-hearted. Anger towards Mary because she was a coward and in need of a shock to put some sense into her mind, since she was unable to do so herself.

Henderson structures the story around two themes, relationships and the sins of the past. The conflicts that lurk in the relationship between a parent and a child, between members of a community, between two people who love each other but people's enmity keeps them apart. The writer successfully develops the issue of being unable to fully escape the past, a theme that is a favorite in Contemporary American Literature, and stresses the ‘'holier-than-thou' attitude of the residents, the selfishness of a parent who fears loneliness and the bravery of the young generation to stand up for what is right. Robert has this strength, Mary has to find it.

The characters- whether we like them or not- are interesting and well-written for the purpose each one of them serves. I liked Robert, I found him courageous, down to earth, considerate to those who mattered and rather calm as a person. He coped with hostility in an assuring, albeit a bit too meek, way. Mary gave me quite a trouble, I confess. I did like her, but I wanted more. You're thirty years old, why do you let everyone treat you as if you are a naive child? She has retained some rather distorted notions of familial and social obligations in her head. Her father was a man I deeply loathed. Am I too harsh? Possibly. I wanted him to vanish, to get the Hell out of Mary's life in some way. I haven't been so furious with a character in a while. The real jewel character, though, is Doris. The mysterious woman in the window...

I loved Henderson's writing. It is direct and beautiful, the chapters are short, the narration is quick and never loses momentum. There was a certain kind of tenderness in the language, but no trace of melodrama and the dialogue was natural. It was hard for me to stop reading, I wanted to know how the story ended, how could Mary escape the suffocating environment in a place whose beauty was wasted in worthless, medieval notions of right and wrong.

I found this novel to be a more realistic depiction of the narrow-minded small communities than the quaint little towns with the quirky characters we've come to see lately. Don't get me wrong, I love those stories, but here we have the raw, unforgiving story of highly unforgiving people....

Many thanks to Harper Perennial and Edelweiss for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.