Flood Summer

Excellent character development and realistic dialogue. A terrific read. My kids (age 9 and 11) devoured the Mysterious Benedict Society as well.

Flood Summer was terrific. Mr. Stewart is a writer of the first order. His character development is impeccable. This is not the type of novel with some definite plot that needs to be resolved in the end. It is a finely written story of characters who struggle to understand themselves as they stumble through life. The prose is subtle yet deeply meaningful. This is the best and most memorable novel I have read in 3 years.

Unable to put Trenton Lee Stewart's feast of a debut novel down, I devoured it in three sittings. Rather than summarize Flood Summer's menu of events, I'd like to rave about the book impressionistically. During its initial chapters, in a scene inside a neck-deep flooded house in the country, the image of a poisonous water moccasin swimming toward the main male character Abe, with its head raised like a frog's, is just one of Stewart's dozens of creepy forget-me-nots. The sheer length and audacity of Stewart's suspenseful description of Abe's swimming, slipping, and sliding around, trying to avoid snakes and free his best friend's mother from where she's wedged, drowning between her car and a tree -- this section is absolutely spellbinding. Afterward of course the novel must go on. But Flood Summer refuses to "dry up," thanks in large part to Abe, a larger than life yet one-hundred-percent three-dimensional Arkansan. Bookish, a lone wolf, he lends the novel Biblical/Lincolnian stature. In his Appalachian Gothic thriller-cum-love story Stewart gives us Abe's parents and working-crew buddies all rendered with the sculptor Duane Hanson's tough loving care. Then, too, there's the dark, exotic newcomer in Hot Springs, Marie, equally sculpted, complete with her train of characters, including the unforgettable waitress/newlywed Laine. I was especially taken with Stewart's portrait of Marie's "single" mother, also named Marie, who has now disappeared but was once totally under the thumb of a sleazy drug dealer who had set both mother and daughter on a wild car trip to pick up moonshine from a blind treacherous redneck, "Uncle Brady." Given "chick lit" and the preponderance of strong female characters in this decade, Stewart's portrait of Mama Marie as a vulnerable woman is extraordinary. She is one of the most enigmatic, disturbing loose cannons I've encountered in current American fiction. As a lost "damsel in distress" minus the sappy connotations, she represents a negative capability her hard-as-nails orphan daughter must find and understand before committing herself to her own true love Abe. Thankfully, Stewart avoids an obvious sappy ending, with Abe and Marie tying the knot. Yet the novel's end is exhilarating, with its suggestion that a flood of feelings will eventually sweep all characters upstream. The only serious current American writer who can match Stewart in the Nail-biting Suspense Department is Donna Tarrt in The Little Friend, which gives us chapter after chapter of controlled plot-driven mayhem. All the while we know what's ultimately going to happen, but moment by moment Stewart and Tarrt pull wondrous wool over our eyes. Five cheers to Trent Stewart! Flood Summer is a first-rate first novel, the best thing that happened to Arkansas -- and to this reviewer -- since Noah rained Bill Clinton down on our heads!

It seems silly to say that a book is for those who enjoy reading, but the distinction that I would draw is that this book is not merely a work transit time-filler. The reader who takes true enjoyment out of consuming good literature is the reader who will most appreciate this literary novel. Stewart has a large quantity of whatever it is that allows good writers to articulate cleanly the observations that we all make casually, unconsciously, every day. There is a feeling of victory when reading an author who describes something where the reader can say "Yes! Yes, it's exactly like that, I just never knew how to say so myself." Beyond being just that, of course, the book contains a collection of compelling characters and situations that widely affect the reader, invoking sensations ranging from joy to betrayal, from heartbreak to hope, from humor to emotional (and even physical!) weariness. I gave this book out to several friends for the holidays and have already (three days later) started hearing very positive feedback. If you truly enjoy reading and you are looking for your next book, consider this one.

While the major publishers are paying fiscal homage to the bland conglomerates by purchasing and publishing bland fiction, university presses have been picking up the aesthetic slack by publishing some of the best literature in translation and, thankfully, the best of American fiction. There is no better illustration of this phenomenon than SMU's publication of Trent Stewart's Flood Summer, a book of a quality that eighty years ago would have earned it the right to be published alongside Thomas Wolfe and hailed the advent of a fresh talent mentioned with the likes of Fitgerald, Faulkner, and the rest of the writers who left Main Street behind in order to write about it. This is a book with its own pace, without a 'hook', a real novel, with intelligent prose, acute observation that takes place naturally within the scope of event and action, and sentences the rise up like water moccasins coiled in trees above flood water evoking the best of Conrad and Cormac McCarthy.