Product Description

Clifford Stone--quixotic curator of arcane Americana at a Boston antiques foundation and cataloguer of our "Vanished American Past"--forsakes Boston and his icy wife to return to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and a life that is both instantly familiar and disturbingly strange.

Cliff's journey home begins as a recovery mission, but it becomes a desperate search for, confrontation with, immersion in, and emergence from his lost past. In a series of libidinous, murderous, hilarious and anxious adventures, Cliff renews old friendships--including one with a girl he thought he'd forgotten--and makes some new enemies.

The Cherry Pit is a flamboyant, lascivious, comic novel about restoration and renewal--and, like all proper comic novels, a serious book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #160785 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 461 pages

About the Author
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by story-tellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas.
His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called "an undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).

Customer Reviews

Incredible!
Harington has once again captured the very essence of life in the South. This story is an entertaining romp that, like all good comic novels, has a very serious side to it. I have never read a better exploration of the human need to have a place to call home. Throughout the entire book, Harington keeps you entertained with murderous, lascivious, and affable adventures that will have you laughing hysterically and pondering the meaning of life at the same time

You can�t go home again
My edition has a great illustration on the front cover. A man is on a bridge overlooking a river. In his background, there are green hills, a church, farmhouses. The image reflected on the water, though, shows skyscrapers and a gilded dome. Such is Clifford's dilemma, For those of us who have a love-hate relationship with our hometown, this book is a must. The back cover of my copy speaks of restoration and renewal. To me the novel had more to do with coming to terms with your past. Cliff is in a sense overcome with nostalgia. He is on the brink of obsession with the way things used to be. He is soon to be 30, and is going through an early middle-age crisis. Always solution-oriented, Cliff goes back home in hopes to find answers to his questions, and even considers relocating there (even though he knows that is impossible). The novel narrates his adventures and misadventures during his time in Little Rock. He rediscovers who his true friends are, and in the process makes a few enemies. Most interesting is his relationship with Dall, his best buddy but a terrible racist. Clifford "converts" him by example, without trying, and the process sounds totally believable, when it would have been very easy to make it look like a fairytale. Cliff's relationship with Margaret, his high-school sweetheart and a very messed up woman, is also well explained. I have always had a friend back home who cannot stop telling me how great it is to still live there.

Although there is a lot of humor (the scene in the pool house had me in stitches), this is ultimately a serious novel, that shows how nostalgia is a mistake.

Farther Before
Entertaining romp through Little Rock and Hot Springs. It's been over ten years since I read this, but I can still remember several scenes vividly. It was good to read last year what finally became of ol' Clifford. Wonderful!