The Shadow Year: A Novel

An amazing read that totally captures the nostalgia and darkness of childhood.

I read this book a while ago, during the 'lazy, hazy' days of summer, but it stayed with me long enough to push me into a review. As I read it, I found myself floating through the story with the protagonist, seeing it through his eyes, feeling the air, smelling the scents and hearing the sounds. To me, when I can see, hear and smell and touch while reading the words on paper it's the sign of great writing. And that The Shadow Year is indeed--great writing. The story was gripping and drew me in by the deliberate, slithering presentation of the events of the plot, just like the waters of a slow river. The story started as a summer of a specific year, in a specific location. But, as it moved on, it was obvious the result of deep and distant memories, the way I recall my childhood at times--a mystical place, yet very real, snatches of sights, sounds and events. This novel is written like a tapistry of those moments of memory. The ending left me wondering for a long time after. To this day, I think of it. That indeed is the sign of a good book.

THE SHADOW YEAR by Jeffrey Ford stands as one of the most striking pieces of fiction I've read so far this year. It's a coming-of-age novel and a statement on dysfunctional families that partially masks itself as a creepy mystery story. It starts out with a face in the window, a prowler in the neighborhood. The time is the 1960s and the location is Long Island, during a kinder, more gentler time when a family's secrets and failings were kept religiously guarded behind closed doors. I was blown away by the atmosphere and eye for detail Ford packs into his writing. This was my first book by this author, and I was immediately impressed. He possesses the keen vision of Stephen King and doesn't flinch when it comes to exploring personal issues. I got the feeling that a lot of what's in these pages is biographical, and if it isn't, I'd be willing to bet Ford knew a family like this. Almost. Ford presents a normal abnormal family, then leavens the whole mix with a hint of the supernatural. There's a ghost and the strange powers little sister Mary has, and the eerie presence of Mr. White, a diabolical villain. But when Ford paints the picture of the family so realistically, most readers are going to get sucked right into his world and forgive the author all of his transgressions. I swallowed the supernatural bits without hesitation because the family were exactly like people I'd grown up with. The father is a workaholic holding down three jobs to get the family by, and so he barely spends any time with his wife or kids. The mother is an alcoholic, and though I would have desperately loved to know why she was, sometimes you just have to accept that there's no answer. The grandparents, Nan and Pop, are on hand to help out, but they're limited. The narrator, who never named himself, has an older brother named Jim who's daring and audacious, and everything a younger brother could ever dream of being. Mary is the little sister and as odd as they come, while possessing a matriarchal power that both boy are in awe of and seek to protect. As all-knowing as Mary is (and she smokes cigarettes too, which is weird but fits in well with the character), she's also an innocent. I sat enthralled as I turned the pages, captivated first by the mystery and the threat, then by the narrator's school projects (especially his impromptu clay moon on a stick!), his ongoing battle with a teacher, and his views of the family and how they worked for and against each other. One of the most original things about the novel is Botch Town, a microcosm created by Jim. It's a replication of the neighborhood where they live. As they sort through the mystery of the prowler, they move the individual figures around to simulate the movements of their neighbors. Unfortunately some turn up missing. Mary has the mysterious power of knowing where they are - even when they're dead. The threat of Mr. White grows on every page. The kids hunt him through the neighborhood, but

Ford's Long Island is one I knew when I lived there in the early 1960's. The novel shows it to me again - the towns sprung up in what had been potato fields, the communities made up entirely of newcomers. His description of a flea-bitten circus that's pitched its tents on a mud flat in Farmingdale is dead-on. I may have seen it on the same day the author did. In those suburbs, the family was everything. The one depicted, with an alcoholic mother, a father working three jobs and a pair of grand-parents slowly fading out of the picture, is what would now be called dysfunctional. What Ford does brilliantly is to show how the kids, the narrator who is in sixth grade, his slightly older brother and somewhat younger sister, are thrown onto their own resources, forced into a tight bond, in the face of danger. And dangers exist in what was supposed to be a paradise free of all the problems of the big cities. Early on in the book a pederast is busted, the main plot line concerns a killer who stalks the neighborhood. It's here that Ford depicts as well as I've seen it done, the tension and fear of a kid with dreadful knowledge he is unable to communicate to any adult. The novel has a mystery and a ghost. It also has in abundance, the sights, the sounds, the smells and the feel of the early stages of the greatest social experiment of this nation in my lifetime.

I've read all of Ford's novels and many of his short stories - including the short story that was the basis for The Shadow Year. This novel is his most interesting. It tells a story that isn't centered around what I think of as Ford's specialty, "The Perfect Fool" - malevolent practitioners of physionomy, eugenics or other quackery. Instead this novel puts us in the shoes of three children, through whom we view their adventure and world with a child's mix of clear eyes and whimsy. The novel manages to be sensitive and moving as well as hilarious. I was also surprised at the memories the story evoked. In the relentless nostalgia of our society where there is no saying or memorable line that hasn't been used for a movie title, Ford's narrative brought back images I hadn't thought of in years. After I finished, I wondered if I read the same book reviewed by Publisher's Weekly.

In a small town on Long Island in the sixties, a family is going through some tough times. Jim, his brother and their sister watched their father work himself to death doing three jobs and their mother drink her self into a stupor. They escaped to the basement where Jim and his brother built "Butch Town"; a cardboard representation of their neighborhood populated with action figures and match box cars. Their sis Mary who is in class X in school because they are not sure if she is very bright or simpleminded changes things in "Butch Town" and those things she alters come true. She removes the figure of a boy and the next day people discover he is missing; nobody finds him. A neighbor Mr. Baritzar is found in snow with his neck broken by a snow plow; Mary took his figure off the board earlier. The boys believe a stranger "Mr. White" is behind the disappearances and Mary traces him on Butch town. A former resident now eighteen years old returns to deal with Mr. White and he is willing to help the three siblings. This interesting fiction is an amalgamation of mysticism, imagination and mystery. The twelve-year old narrator keeps a chronicle of the goings on in the town for the year and since the story is told in his first person, readers get into the heart of an adolescent young boy. The atmosphere is gothic in which reality and the supernatural meet to form a book well worth reading. Harriet Klausner