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The Barrowfields: A Novel
The Barrowfields A Novel
Author: Phillip Lewis
A richly textured coming-of-age story about fathers and sons, home and family, recalling classics by Thomas Wolfe and William Styron, by a powerful new voice in fiction — Just before Henry Aster?s birth, his father?outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow?reluctantly returns to the small Appalachian town in which he was raised and inst...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780451495648
ISBN-10: 0451495640
Publication Date: 3/7/2017
Pages: 352
Rating:
  • Currently 3/5 Stars.
 4

3 stars, based on 4 ratings
Publisher: Hogarth
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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hmills96 avatar reviewed The Barrowfields: A Novel on + 9 more book reviews
I am fairly certain that to qualify for the genre âliterary fictionâ there is only one requirement: that your book must be as morose as possible. Look up Literary Fiction in the thesaurus and you will find the words Depressing, Melancholy, Miserable, Sulky, and Sullen. I cannot name a single book from the genre that does not fit this description. Maybe I'm wrong. But all the examples I can think of are just this.

The Barrowfields is all of these. It starts out interestingly enoughâalmost reminiscent of Cold Mountain in its descriptions of Appalachia. You can hear the mountain twang in the narrator's voice as he speaks about his father's family history. Only later do you realize you're no longer in the 1800s, but in modern times.

That shift really confused meâas did the change in the narrator's voice. At some point, he loses that twang and gains a snobby upper class air. To be fair, his father raises him in literature, but the vocabulary used is a bit obnoxious. Words like excrescence, deliquesce, and indomitable are commonplace in his story.

We lose characters a lot in this book too. People just drop off for no discernable reasonâhis mother, his school friends. People come into his life and then he moves on without them. Time passes, and he isn't interested in waiting on it.

I feel very melancholy about The Barrowfields. I didn't dislike it, nor did I particularly like it. It's literary fiction, so I suppose I am meant to feel SOMETHINGâ¦and I do. I'm just not entirely sure what that SOMETHING is.


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