Product Description

On the edge of the Adirondack wilderness, survival is a way of life for the Hazen family. Gary Hazen is a respected forester and hunter, known for his good instincts and meticulous planning. He and his wife, Susan, have raised their sons to appreciate the satisfaction of this difficult but honest life. In spite of this, the boys, men now, are slipping away. His older son, Gary David, is secretly dating a woman of whom his father would not approve even as Kevin, the younger boy, struggles against the limits of his family’s hardscrabble lifestyle, wanting something more. On the first day of hunting season the Hazen men enter the woods, unaware that the trip they are embarking on will force them to come to terms with their differences and will forever change their lives.

In The Grace That Keeps This World, Tom Bailey gives us an emotional page-turner, infused with a deep sense of foreboding. Alternately narrated by the Hazens and their neighbors in Lost Lake, the story perfectly captures the enduring rhythms of life in a rural town.

The Grace That Keeps This World is an October, 2005 Book Sense pick.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #997404 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-18
• Released on: 2005-10-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This accomplished, moving first novel (after Bailey's collection Crow Man) is about fathers and sons, tough love and compassion, the bonds of community and the solace of belief. Gary and Susan Hazen are natives of Lost Lake, a hardscrabble town in the Adirondacks, high school sweethearts who have raised their two sons on the satisfaction of living off the land. At this suspenseful narrative's outset, Susan recollects a fateful day, the start of deer hunting season, hinting that some tragedy has struck her loving but combustible family. Gary is a highly principled and respected woodsman and hunter, but his self-righteousness brings him into conflict with his sons. Both young men have secrets that will strain the family fabric, and together father and sons weave a tangle of intention and circumstance that will culminate in an act that will test their power to survive. Alternately narrated by the Hazen family and members of the community, the novel sustains an elegiac tone even as events rise to a dramatic denouement. This novel has the validity of deeply felt truths and characters who are bound and motivated by a love that arches the chasm of divergent ambitions and desires.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Gary Hazen lives with his wife and two grown sons in the Adirondacks, close to the Canadian border. They spend their days cutting trees, growing vegetables, and hunting for animals. Gary tries to keep his family together by providing for them as fathers have for centuries. Holding on to traditions and his own high standards, he expects them to do the same despite the many conflicts both internal and external affecting their lives. This exquisite novel centers around one event: opening day of deer-hunting season. An annual ritual for the Hazens, this important occasion determines how well they will eat during the harsh winter to come. When the younger son, a college student, decides not to participate in this years hunt, his father becomes enraged and hits him, prompting Kevin to move in with his pregnant girlfriend on campus. In the meantime, the newly hired environmental conservation officer is determined to catch Gary illegally bagging an extra deer. Each chapter, written from one of the Hazens viewpoints or those of other characters impacting their lives, builds up to the final tragedy as foreshadowed in the prologue. Vivid descriptions of the natural environment are abundant in this beautifully written first novel. A profoundly emotional experience, the story will hook readers.–Pat Bender, The Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, PA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Tom Bailey drew the climax of his debut novel from a news report he heard in 1991 about a grisly incident in upstate New York, but The Grace That Keeps This World sounds more like some modern-day version of a Greek tragedy. With a chorus of narrators, his story about a family in the Adirondacks during the days leading up to hunting season moves slowly and beautifully toward an indelible disaster.

Gary Hazen, the patriarch at the center of this emotionally powerful tale, is a hardworking, self-righteous man who returned from Vietnam determined to live a simple, uncluttered life in Lost Lake, N.Y. He and his high-school sweetheart have raised their two boys close to the land. He makes a little money as a private forester of 40,000 acres, but most of what the family needs each year they manage to wrest from nature before winter starts their annual battle for survival.

This year, though, the Hazens are threatened by new, internal challenges common to any family. Gary's sons, 19 and 26, need to grow up; they need to break away from his sense of how they should live. That would be easier for everyone if he weren't so impressed by his own rough-hewn values. To Gary, laziness and messiness -- physical or moral -- are intolerable sins. The elder son, Gary David, is a model of quiet devotion and obedience, but surely he's too old to be climbing out of his bedroom window to see a woman his father doesn't like. His younger son, Kevin -- the first in the family to go to college -- has the nerve to resist more openly, but under his father's criticisms (and fists), he can't build much confidence. Their struggle for independence comes to a head when Kevin's vegetarian girlfriend insists he give up hunting, the lifeblood of his father's existence.

Bailey tells this story in chapters that rotate through many narrators, some only tangentially related to the Hazens. It's a technique that can slow down the novel and blur its focus, but providing such a full picture of the town allows us to feel the shock of the horrible tragedy that finally reverberates through this community. Still, the best sections are narrated by members of the Hazen family and by an omniscient voice that describes the younger son as he struggles to carve out his own life. Here, Bailey demonstrates profound sympathy for the boy's conflicted feelings toward his father and for the father's desperation to pass down values his children should discover on their own. His wife, Susan, knows this -- knows her husband is too severe, knows her sons need to act their age -- but she also knows they all love each other more than they can say.

If the novel has a flaw, it's that Bailey writes too beautifully for some of these narrators to sound believable. For instance, he wants Gary to be a hard, unsophisticated man, the kind of guy who's skeptical of college learning and refers to New York City with a sneer, but when he comes home one night, he says, "I find Susan standing in the kitchen windows before the sink. Underneath the bright lights I see her clear as day -- it's as if she were standing on a stage and I was watching, standing back in shadowed wings behind the dark audience. She's facing toward me, bowed a bit as she works washing at the sink, as if she is saying some silent prayer." Lovely, yes, but too often the various narrators in this backwater town rise to speak with that poetic elegance, dropping their own individuality to assume the well-crafted voice of a college English professor who writes award-winning short stories. (Bailey teaches at Susquehanna University in Harrisburg, Penn., and was selected for inclusion in a Pushcart Prize Anthology in 2000.)

Strangely, after staring at these people so intensely during the days leading up to deer season, Bailey blinks at the moment of crisis, a structural decision that emphasizes the Greek nature of this tragedy. (Medea, remember, murders her children between scenes; Oedipus pokes out his eyes off stage.) There's no doubting that Bailey ruminated over how best to handle this moment because The Grace That Keeps This World is his second treatment of this story; it's a much-expanded version of "Snow Dreams," which he published in DoubleTake magazine in 1999. Placing the disaster in a gap between chapters, though, is a risky choice; some readers are bound to feel the book can't afford to give up its most dramatic moment, but I suspect Bailey knew that the unspeakable tragedy that finally shatters this family would be more stirring as a silhouette than in color. This is, after all, a story about a man forced to expand his moral imagination, and in the end it inspires the same sympathy from us.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

interesting family drama
Adirondacks forester Gary Hazen believes he lives the good life with his beloved wife Susan, and their two sons twenty-four year-old Gary David and nineteen year-old Kevin because he loves the outdoors. He firmly believes his family feels the same way.

On a hunting trip in the mountain wilderness near their Upstate New York home, Gary begins to wonder if perhaps his younger son does not like the life of a woodsman. Whereas Gary David seems the heir apparent to him, college student Kevin wants to be a teacher and refuses to join them on the hunt as he promised his girlfriend he would not. Meanwhile new environmental conservation officer, Josephine Roy has warned Gary and others that she will enforce all the state hunting rules that guys like him have ignored over the years. Josephine and Gary David have a relationship, but Gary's son fears telling his dad that he is sleeping with the enemy. The potential family schism comes to a tragic head on the first day of the new hunting season.

Turning Kahil Gibran's message of parents letting their children go on its head, Tom Bailey provides an interesting family drama that is somewhat difficult to follow due to an abundance of narrators (a baker's dozen at least). The character driven story line focuses mostly on the inner tensions between the Hazens, but has sidebars narrated by others that seem out of place. Tom Bailey puts the Adirondacks setting to strong use in order to display the differences between the generations and when it concentrates on the Hazens it make for a fine tale of personal conflict.

Harriet Klausner

A self-reliant Adirondack family's crucible

Tom Bailey's new novel about Mississippi race relations in 1944, "Cotton Song," has just been released. I hope that those who discover Bailey as a writer for the first time through that book will backtrack to this, his first novel.

"The Grace That Keeps This World" lovingly and luminously lays out the hard lives of the Hazen family who live in the middle of the Adirondack Park. Susan Hazen, wife and mother, alerts us in the prologue to unspecified tragedy that the Hazen father and his two sons will meet on the first day of deer hunting season. Then, the novel delves into the week before opening Saturday, shifting with each chapter between first-person perspectives (with one third-person exception) of family members and other residents of their rough-hewn community. Bailey portrays the reticences, the secrets, the fissures, the pride, the faith (religious and otherwise), the stubborness, and the concealed love that eddies between these characters. Twenty-first century readers are reminded that some folks still live rugged lives off the land; lives that count on the meat from antlered bucks brought down. The Hazens don't hunt for wall trophies. They don't waste a sinew of carcass. But the choice of the parents doesn't necessarily carry to the next generation. Sons Gary David and Kevin have to decide whether they will cleave to their strong-willed father's frontiersman-like expectations that his sons will work with him in their adulthood, or whether they will live more modernly and out of his shadow. The suspense builds over when and how they might declare independence. Will a huge family crack-up ensue because of "revolt" by the sons? Or will destinies and vantage points be forestalled and altered by the fateful opening day?

"The Grace That Keeps This World" is a work of aching depth and beauty. Although the the tragedy and its aftermath could have been elaborated upon, and there were other, earlier places in the novel where characters were too economic with conversation, this is a book that remains with the reader. Images of Susan Hazen in her kitchen or garden, of Gary Hazen chain-sawing thick limbs for winter heating or worshiping in the front pew at church, of Gary David tip-toeing around downstairs to keep from waking his mother at an unearthly hour, and Kevin practicing his memorized recitation from "The Odyssey" or wallking toward shots heard on the hunt don't fade away easily. The heart feels keenly the humanity, the fallibility, but also the grace, in these pages.

Four and a half stars.

Worth the Wait
I first heard Tom Bailey read the short story, upon which this novel is based, to the parents of his writing students at Susquehanna University. Five years have passed since that day - the day when I began waiting for him to turn the story into a novel. Tonight I finished reading the novel. It cannot be put down until you have read it in its entirety. The Grace That Keeps This World was definitely worth the wait!