Product Description

Impossible to categorize, With is a sensual, irresistible tale, full of unexpected twists and turns. What starts out as a suspenseful recounting of child abduction evolves into the story of eight-year-old Robin Kerr growing up in the wilds of the Ozarks, left to fend for herself on a remote, inaccessible mountain-top. Without ‘human’ company for a decade, forced to live off the land, Robin is never alone; her animal companions grow more numerous year by year, and the ‘live ghost’ of a young boy who once lived on the mountain is her constant companion. With a dog, a young girl and a ghost as the main viewpoint characters in this remarkable novel, Donald Harington, creator of the mythic and magical Ozark town of Stay More, has given us a fascinating and triumphant story of survival—and the most original love story ever told.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #368245 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 491 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Transforming a kidnapping plot into an epic rural fable and then a touchingly poignant love story, Harington crafts a wildly imaginative tour de force about a young Arkansas girl who survives a harrowing abduction and undergoes a remarkable series of epiphanies. Robin Kerr is the prepubescent protagonist who is snatched from her single mother by Sog Alan, a former state trooper who takes her to his ramshackle house on the remote pinnacle of Mt. Madewell just outside Harington's beloved mythical village of Stay More. Her kidnapper's illness and impotence keep Robin from being ravaged, and she capitalizes on Sog Alan's twisted love for her to carve out a bizarre existence with her abductor, aided by Sog's dog, Hreapha, who is given a singular voice of her own. Sog Alan's failing health eventually weakens him, and Robin is able to shoot him during a final rape attempt. Her efforts to escape the mountain prove futile, though, and she slowly adapts to a hardscrabble backwoods existence, aided by a growing menagerie of pets that eventually includes a bobcat and a bear cub. Robin also receives advice from the spirit of 12-year-old Adam Madewell, the son of a cooper whose family owned the land before moving to California. Wary of civilization, Robin chooses to stay on the mountain even when she has the opportunity to leave, and her pristine rural existence remains uninterrupted until love comes in the form of the middle-aged Adam Madewell, who returns to Arkansas after a successful but unfulfilling stint as a California cooper and winemaker. Harington's taut storytelling lends edgy suspense to the kidnapping story, and the combination of wise, comic animal voices and Adam's disembodied incarnation adds life to the pastoral narrative. Harington has invented a unique post-Faulknerian piece of fictional terrain in his Stay More novels, and this powerful effort should further enhance his reputation as one of the great undiscovered novelists of our time.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
For four decades, Donald Harington has been writing novels about his native Arkansas, particularly the Ozarks, which are the setting for his made-up town, Stay More. In this imaginative but uneven installment (Harington's prose recalls, at once, Faulkner and Tom Robbins), a golden-haired seven-year-old girl is abducted and taken to a deserted house in the mountains by a retired cop. When he dies, she is left alone to fend for herself. Or almost alone: parts of the book dwell in the thoughts of a wise old dog who befriends her; others are narrated by the spirit of a young boy who had to leave Stay More when his parents moved to California, but who loved the place so much that part of him stuck around. It is strange that, given such a fanciful premise, the novel is almost too believable: Harington works so hard at establishing his fantasy (beautiful girl growing up naked in the wild, with beasts) that he erases any sense of mystery and makes his world seem almost mundane.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post

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.

Reviewed by Steven Moore

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The best novel yet by the best writer in America!
I actually had another book in my hands when I spotted this new novel by Donald Harington. My heart literally jumped for joy. A new novel by one of my most favorite writers! Immediately, I put the other book back and picked up this one. Later that same evening, I began to read...

And I was not disappointed. Although I have enjoyed all of his recent novels, I could not help but compare them with The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Some Other Place. The Right Place., and my personal favorite, Let Us Build Us A City. To my mind, those recent novels simply did not to the same degree elicit the same response (that wonderful glorious feeling!) in me as did those earlier titles.

But now, with WITH...I am beside myself with joy.

I cannot bear to relate the plot. There are too many surprises, too many narrative twists, too much...joy (there it is again!); to spoil any part of this with plot recitation is at the very least, a venal sin.

Audaciously written in a style and technique befitting the best the postmodern has to offer, WITH is a novel so rewarding, no reader can go wrong both reading it and pushing it into the hands of their friends. Those friends will thank you...over and over again.

One of those original and finely crafted novels
At the tender age of 8 years, Robin Kerr had to learn how to fend for herself on a remote, inaccessible, mountain-top in the wilds of the Ozark mountain range. Until she was 18, Robin had no human company but she did not lack for animal companionship and the company of the"live ghost" of a young boy who had himself once lived on the mountain. With is a major, 491-page novel that is written by author Donald Harington (a professor and lecturer of art and art history) with a feeling for language enriched with southern idioms and an almost lyrical sense of expression. Very strongly endorsed and recommended, With is one of those original and finely crafted novels that will be discovered with appreciation over and over by generations of future readers.

Discovery
Harington has written a multi-layered, mystical tale about love and relationships, and the coming of age of a young girl, surviving alone in a mountain cabin. But this, as all his novels, is so much more than a simple narrative. An intellectual masterpiece,it is best enjoyed slowly, in sips, as the tale unfolds and the language enfolds. If you have not yet discovered Harington, you will be delighted with this book, and happier still to know that it is only one of a series about the people and events of Stay More, Arkansas.