WITH
Donald Harington
Toby Press
Fiction
ISBN: 1592640508

Donald Harington's prepositionally titled new novel, WITH, revisits the dying town of Stay More, Arkansas, the Ozark encampment that served as the setting for three of his previous novels (which have been handsomely re-issued by Toby Press). The town and its environs resemble Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, but as the story begins, Stay More is dying the same death as so many rural communities throughout the United States. Ignoring the plea of the town's name, its residents are moving to bigger cities or heading out west to California.

This is exactly what Sugrue "Sog" Alan, a Stay More native and former police officer, claims to be doing when he sells all his possessions and stocks up on supplies; he even goes so far as to place a sign reading, "Gone to California," in the window of his ramshackle home. Sog's intention, however, is not westward migration, but a sojourn in the Ozarks --- with a kidnapped eight-year-old girl named Robin Kerr.

Abducting her from a skating rink, Sog secrets Robin away to the old, abandoned Madewell homestead, "resting on top of one of the highest mountains in Newton County and practically impossible to get to nowadays." Miles and miles of tough, treacherous terrain separate them from the nearest human, and no vehicle can go beyond the last "terrible mile of ravines and the rocky ledge along the bluff and a godforsaken forest trail."

Here, Sog teaches her how to live off the land, but after he leaves her --- and I'll let Harington tell you how he does --- Robin is left alone in a house with no electricity, no running water, no communication. But while her feelings toward Sog are understandably complicated --- "After all, he was all she had in this world" --- she manages to survive without television and radio, to get water from the well, and to shoot wild boar and garden vegetables.

Robin makes friends with the animals who wander through the yard, especially Sog's dog. He always calls her Bitch, but her name is actually Hreapha, which is the sound of her bark. (In Harington's mythology, dogs only speak their names, the reverse of human speech, as humans so very rarely say their own names.) As the weird and wonderfully inventive story develops, Robin's circle of faunal friends grows to include a bobcat named (of course) Robert, a stag named Dewey, a king snake named Queen of Sheba, a raccoon named Ralgrub (burglar spelled backwards), and a bear named Paddington, among many others. Not only are these animals articulate characters, but Harington devotes chapters to many of them, letting them tell the story from their own perspectives and in their own voices.

She also befriends the spirit of a boy named Adam Madewell, who grew up on the mountain that bears his family name and lived in the house Robin and her pets now occupy. However, since the corporeal version of him still lives and breathes in Napa Valley, California, this version of Adam is no mere ghost, but rather is what he and the animals know as an in-habit--- "an invisible, unsmellable presence, a second self beyond the sense." Or, as Hreapha explains, "An in-habit is part of someone who loves a particular place so much that regardless of where they go they always leave their in-habit behind." It's a complex notion, one whose mysteries saturate nearly every page of WITH, and Harington wisely leaves it nebulous and puzzling, the better to pique the reader's imagination.

As this long novel progresses, it becomes increasingly epic and intricate in story and scope, with Robin discovering her own ingenuity and sexuality as she matures into a self-possessed woman. Parallel to this maturation, Harington makes the novel more and more formally playful by revealing deeper and deeper layers to the story and its narrator. "Art is a form of a hiding and a seeking and a finding," observes Robert the bobcat, "and that which is hidden is more magically stimulating." Harington adheres steadfastly to this aesthetic by burying ideas deep in the tale and only revealing them slowly and gradually, a story as striptease. As a result, the final hundred pages are as finely imagined and gorgeously whimsical as anything you're likely to read this year.

Or, as one of the canine characters declares, "In all my born days I never heard tell of such marvels."

   --- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.