Review : With, a brutal, fanciful Stay More tale
by Brian Walter
for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

With, by Donald Harington, Toby Press, 491 pages, $19.95 Early in the 10th chapter of Donald Harington's startling and triumphant new novel With, the main character, Robin Kerr, poses an impossible question: "Why is this happening?"
    The question is not just impossible for 7-year-old Robin to answer. How could anyone plausibly explain what has happened to her - innocently attending a friend's birthday party at the local skating rink only to be whisked away by a former policeman who intends to make her his "truelove"?
    Robin's story is every parent's nightmare : the unspeakable prospect of an innocent child falling into the clutches of a cunning and ruthless adult predator. But in the deft hands of Harington, this most harrowing of setups gradually becomes a marvelous story of improbable growth, heroic resolve, and life-giving love.
    With is still a Harington novel - which is to say a work of sprightly, delightful humor. But With mixes the light with the very dark, winning plenty of surprising laughter from Robin's grim situation but not in the least sugar-coating that grimness.
    This is Harington's signature talent. In book after book since his first novel, The Cherry Pit, appeared in 1965, Harington has wrung divinely improbable comedy from the trials and horrors that his characters undergo.
    But in telling the remarkable story of Robin Kerr's abduction and hardscrabble life on Madewell Mountain, With conjures a magic that is exceptional even for Harington.
    Many years and several novels have passed since a critic labeled Harington "America's greatest unknown novelist." But to judge from the enthusiasm that With has already generated among critics, Harington may finally have found the story line that will remove the last adjective from that backhanded compliment.
    THE MAYOR OF STAY MORE When you meet Donald Harington for the first time, two things will probably strike you: first, he is quite tall, and second, he smiles a lot. And while the impression made by his 6-foot-5-inch frame will soon pass, the smile - and the air of a mysterious good humor that goes along with it - probably will not.
    Part of the mystery stems from Harington's near-deafness. A bout with viral meningitis at 12 robbed the young Don of most of his hearing. So whatever it is that has put him in a good mood, it is probably not something you just said (however clever).
    Harington's wife, Kim, has an explanation for the smile. When Don is puttering about the house, happily humming to himself, he is, as she puts it, "in Stay More."
    Harington's answer to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Stay More is the Ozark mountain village that has served as home or haunt to the characters of all his novels since 1970's Lightning Bug. The name comes from the residents' polite entreaty to departing guests.
    But Stay More provides much more than an idyllic rural setting for Harington's novels. In stories spanning 10 novels and more than 150 years, Stay More has emerged as a surprisingly versatile version of the American Eden - a place where compelling innocence is still possible even if the Fall was inevitable.
    American writers have long wrestled with the dream of a return to Eden. Even a partial list of their names makes for an impressive and varied honor roll: James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Toni Morrison, to name a few.
    But the image of an American Eden predates all these writers, hearkening back still further to the sermons delivered by the Puritans as they sailed the Atlantic for the wilds of the New World. The early spiritual leaders preached that they were forsaking the corruption of old Europe for a promised land that would - with God's blessing - overflow with milk and honey.
    Not surprisingly, America did not lend itself too readily to these idealized visions. In fact, with the possible exception of the ecstatic maverick Whitman, American writers usually showed just how far short of the Eden ideal their young country would fall.
    Hawthorne and Faulkner, in particular, brooded over the sins committed by their fathers, sins that belied a simple myth of paradise regained in America.
    But where other American writers have exposed the myth of a new Eden, Harington has found a way of having the apple and eating it too. Over and over again, his characters taste the devastating knowledge of good and evil, but without letting their newfound knowledge exile them from paradise. Instead, it only roots them still more deeply in Stay More.
    In The Choiring of the Trees, for example, Nail Chism begins as the very emblem of pastoral innocence: a shepherd tending his flock in the high pastures above Stay More. But when he refuses to run moonshine during Prohibition, his honesty lands him on death row, framed for a rape he didn't commit.
    Nail is severely beaten and led away more than once to the electric chair, but his inspired comedian of an author has better things in mind for him. An improbable chain of events allows Nail eventually to escape and make a harrowing return to Stay More. There, he will have to spend the rest of his life in hiding, but with the very woman who was to draw his portrait at the execution.
    The tortures Nail undergoes on death row are almost indescribable, brutalities that no one should have to endure. But it is only his time on death row that leads Nail to discover a literally life-saving love. This is the gift that Harington almost invariably finds a way to bestow on his characters.
    In the Eden of Stay More, the serpent is a fixture, always seducing Harington's characters into shattering knowledge. But when they have fallen as far as they can go, Harington's characters find a way to redeem the loss. The trick, they learn, is not to regard the serpent as their mortal enemy, but instead to recognize in him their mortal friend.
    WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? In With, the serpent takes the form of Sugrue "Sog" Alan, the retired police officer and pedophile who kidnaps Robin. Sog has been working "pedo" cases for years, slyly confiscating lurid magazines and scheming for the day when he can capture his own "truelove."
    When a drug bust unexpectedly lands him a stash of untraceable money, Sog takes an early retirement and begins to turn his pollutive dreams into sordid reality.
    This is not Sog's first appearance in a Harington novel. He plays an important part in Some Other Place, The Right Place and, especially, in When Angels Rest.
    When Angels Rest, in fact, opens with the 12-year-old narrator Donny explaining how the 17-year-old Sog broke his arm with a baseball bat. It is the first of many cruel acts that Sog will commit on Donny's watch.
    A violent bully all his life, Sog is an almost unbearably revolting figure. But he plays a crucial role for Harington: a natural foil for innocence, a man who cannot help inflicting his own self loathing on the innocents he meets.
    In With, Sog also represents a terrific challenge for his author, whose personal brand of comedy requires his characters ultimately to see the corrupting serpent as a friend. How could Robin (or the reader, for that matter) ever embrace such a repulsive figure?
    As improbable as it seems, Harington pulls it off. For while Sog does make Robin his victim, he also (through no intention of his own) gives her an unexpected but superb gift: the opportunity to develop a resourcefulness and independence that she never would have needed growing up in the town of Harrison.
    As the years pass on Madewell Mountain, Robin does not merely survive, but learns to thrive on her hard but simple life. Armed with a Farmer's Cyclopaedia and the supplies Sog laid in, Robin becomes Stay More's version of her namesake, Robinson Crusoe, working the land to feed and sustain herself through all the seasons and even a terrible drought.
    But even more importantly, Sog tells Robin stories of Stay More. Without books or television or any of the other typical sources of stories to feed her hungry imagination, Robin takes Stay More and makes it her own, using cut-out dolls to replay and embellish the town's history.
    It is a delightful and poignant touch that connects Robin to her author. In her exile, Robin has no resource but her own imagination to keep the loneliness at bay. The yearning for human contact that marks all of Harington's characters transforms Robin into a storyteller of inspired invention - much like Harington himself.
    What does not kill Robin ultimately makes her stronger, not to mention richer and more meaningfully happy than she would otherwise have been. Why is this happening? So that the cruelty of Robin's fate can gradually become a blessing - thanks to Robin's ever-smiling author.
    STAYING MORE Harington is already knee-deep in his next novel, about a man who shows movies around the small towns of Newton County during the Depression. He tries to avoid Stay More in his circuit because of some painful childhood associations, but it's a safe bet that he won't manage to stay away from it forever not with Harington generously devising his fate.
    As for With, Harington is pleased to note the strong early notices it has generated. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews have already given it starred reviews, and Booklist has praised it warmly. Harington has been writing novels long enough not to try to predict sales figures, but these and other initial responses have certainly been encouraging.
    Still, if Harington were writing the story of With's fate on the mercurial fiction market, what kind of a happy ending would he devise for it? Would he use the future tense at the end of the story (as he does in all his novels) to let With take the best seller lists by storm in some fond future?
    If the answer is yes, it will only be yes with an ironic twist. With will vault to No. 1 only the day after the author - in despair over his unending obscurity - will remove himself permanently to Stay More, first after staging his own death to ward off all attempts to track him down.
    In Stay More, the author will shut off all communication with the outside world, holing himself up to write more stories under a pseudonym. He will never learn that With has made him famous, or that it could have made him rich.
    But it will not matter. Because as the one permanent resident of Stay More, a land blessed by time, he has more riches at his fingertips than he could ever fully spend. Brian Walter teaches English and film studies for Washington University in St. Louis. Donald Harington's Web site is http://donaldharington.com Harington signings Donald Harington will sign copies of his new novel, With, and his other novels at the following times and places: 1-2:30 p.m. Saturday, Tyler & Tyler Booksellers, 4558 John F. Kennedy Blvd., North Little Rock; 3-4:30 p.m. Saturday at WordsWorth Books & Company, 5920 R St. in Little Rock; 11 a.m. April 24, Arkansas Literary Festival at the River Market in Little Rock; 2-4 p.m. May 1, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Fayetteville; 2-4 p.m. May 2, Carnegie Public Library, Eureka Springs; 5 p.m. May 6, Square Books, Oxford, Miss.; 5-7 p.m. May 7, Burke's Book Store, 1719 Poplar Ave., Memphis; and 1 p.m. May 8, That Bookstore, 316 W. Main St., Blytheville.

This story was published Sunday, April 11, 2004

WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD REVIEW SERVICE
By WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD REVIEW SERVICE
  WITH
By Donald Harington. Toby. 491 pp. $19.95
Reviewed by Steven Moore

I wish I could avoid describing this wonderful novel in any detail, for certain of its elements (like pedophilia) will alienate some readers, and others will stop reading this review as soon as I mention that another plot element involves a young girl who communicates with a dog via a Ouija board. (Wait, come back! See what I mean?) With depends more than most novels on narrative surprises, which I shouldn't give away. And simply ending my review right here by praising With as the sweetest child abduction story I've ever read clearly won't do. This will be tricky.

For nearly 30 years, Donald Harington has been writing ingenious novels set in Arkansas's Ozark Mountains, mostly in a small town called Stay More. Despite rave reviews, his novels have never risen above cult status, and he has won the dubious honor of being called "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist". (I'll confess I'd never heard of him until last year, when a colleague began urging his novels on me.) He has earned his keep as an art professor, primarily at the University of Arkansas but with spells up North.

I can't put it off any longer, so here goes: With begins like a sleazy story out of an old Police Gazette but ends like a feminist revision of Genesis.

In the early 1970s, Sugrue ("Sog") Alan, an Arkansas state trooper nearing retirement who lucked into half-a-million dollars when killing a drug dealer unobserved, decides to disappear. He locates a long-abandoned and nearly inaccessible house at the top of nearby Madewell Mountain, buys enough supplies to last him for years and tells everyone he's moving to California. He moves all his stuff up to the mountain retreat and lacks only one more necessity: a child bride.

Beautiful, blonde Robin Kerr is 7 1/2 when the novel opens, Alice's age in Through the Looking-Glass. Sog stalks and snatches her, installing her in a different kind of wonderland where she will remain for the next 10 years. (For various reasons he doesn't molest her, though not for lack of trying.)

Robin tries but fails to escape, resigns herself to her situation and slowly begins her unplanned metamorphosis from spoiled city girl to nature goddess.

Sog's dog seems to be the only other resident for a while. After Sog ceases to play an active role (that circumlocution is necessary to avoid spoiling the plot and to account for the different role he plays in the second half of the novel), Robin is joined by other animals: a bobcat, a litter of puppies, a raccoon, a snake, a fawn and others, all of whom learn to communicate with Robin and with each other.

And then there's the spirit of former resident Adam Madewell, 12 years old when his parents forced him to accompany them to California years before the novel opens, and forever 12 as he continues to haunt his old homestead as an "in-habit." (We're told that "An in-habit is part of someone who loves a particular place so very much that regardless of where they go they always leave their in-habit behind.") Though With is primarily Robin's story, we get Adam's as well; he eventually decides to return to Stay More, but this Adam is unaware that a new Eve inhabits his old paradise which his in-habit never left.

As confusing as this may sound, With is a joy to read, partly due to the variety of audacious techniques Harington uses. First, each chapter is narrated from the point of view of a specific character, which may not sound all that innovative until you learn that many of these characters are not human. (Robin's menagerie not only learns to communicate with their mistress and with each other, but also with you, dear reader.) He manipulates verb tenses, moving from past to present to future as the narrative requires. By way of literary allusion, Harington aligns his novel with similar adventures; we are told, for good reason, "Among the hundreds of books that Adam read at the Yountville Public Library were Stevenson's Silverado
Squatters . . . as well as his Treasure Island. He also enjoyed Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions."

Like all of these works, With explores the pluses and minuses of abandoning civilization for a solitary life communing with nature. Sog wanted to isolate himself because he became convinced that "the world was just no damn good, life was a joke, the world was full of meanness and wrongdoing and corruption and selfishness and evil and backstabbing and shoddy merchandise and wickedness and bum raps and disorderly conduct and weakness and
malpractice and greed and moral turpitude and what not. It had been his plan to learn her to appreciate the isolation of this wilderness that protected her from all that badness and transgression." Robin misses out on the usual joys and sorrows of teenage girls, but the novel makes a strong case that she's better off that way. Hudson's Rima the Bird Girl comes to a tragic end, but Robin is clearly a better person for her experiences, and in the final line of the novel she exhibits a wisdom far beyond her 18 years.

Early during her abduction, Robin begins creating paper dolls, names them after residents of Stay More, and then begins inventing adventures for them - adventures that can be found in Harington's other novels. (Three of them have been reissued by his new publisher, and I hope more are on their way.) With is as whimsical as a paper-doll show while being deeply rooted in the earth; it gives the Garden of Eden myth a happy ending, and should find the wide readership that Harington so richly deserves.

Steven Moore is the author of several books and essays on modern
literature.
(c) 2004, Washington Post Book World Service/
Washington Post Writers Group

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