Product Description

When Gabriel Lynch moves with his mother and brother from a brownstone in Baltimore to a dirt-floor hovel on a homestead in Kansas, he is not pleased. He does not dislike his new stepfather, a former slave, but he has no desire to submit to a life of drudgery and toil on the untamed prairie. So he joins up with a motley crew headed for Texas only to be sucked into an ever-westward wandering replete with a mindless violence he can neither abet nor avoid–a terrifying trek he penitently fears may never allow for a safe return. David Anthony Durham is a genuine talent bent on devastating originality and Gabriel’s Story is as formidable a debut as we have witnessed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #595241 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-30
• Released on: 2002-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
With his first novel, Gabriel's Story, David Anthony Durham delivers a fresh take on the American frontier. The settlers aren't white men but emancipated slaves, whose journey into the promised land is driven by the harsh memory of captivity. Unlike the wagon-train pioneers we're used to reading about, Durham's characters are refugees of Reconstruction. Yet they're seduced by the same promises as their white counterparts--promises that anyone can be a landowner, that this land is your land, that it's only a matter of staking your claim.

The protagonist, 15-year-old Gabriel Lynch, wonders why his widowed mother falls for this propaganda. He sulks on the long train ride from New York to Kansas, pining for the humble brownstone apartment they're leaving behind. He dreads their arrival on the prairie and their rendezvous with his new stepfather, Solomon, a man the boy distrusts as virtually all teenage boys distrust their smiling, imperious stepfathers. Upon arriving at Solomon's sod house, Gabriel's contempt only increases: "It was a single room. The walls pushed into and cramped the space, making it feel much smaller on the inside than the shadow had indicated from the outside. It was smoky and moist and earthen all at once, with a smell unpleasant enough to contort Gabriel's face."

The patience required to cultivate the hard, unforgiving prairie isn't something Gabriel possesses, and soon he runs away--joining a gang of mostly white cowboys headed for Texas. Like the heroes in most Wild West novels, Gabriel seeks adventure. What he finds is racism, violence, and eventually murder. Compelling, suspenseful, and meticulously written, Gabriel's Story is an exploration of the idea of the frontier and the meaning of ownership, filtered through the narrator's cynical, over-the-hill teenage perspective. And Gabriel himself, who seems old beyond his years, is a memorable protagonist: a grouchy lost boy, impatient for his life to unfold. --Ellen Williams

From Publishers Weekly
The old West, both beautiful and brutal, is the setting of Durham's magnificently realized debut novel, a classic coming-of-age story of an African-American boy. Shortly after the Civil War, 15-year-old Gabriel Lynch, his mother and younger brother head out from Baltimore to meet Gabriel's new stepfather in Kansas, where the family hopes to make a fresh start as farmers. But Gabriel finds homesteading to be backbreaking and depressing and is soon lured away by cruel, charismatic Marshall Hogg, who's leading a group of cowboys down into Texas. It seems a dream come true for Gabriel, but then the nightmare begins. While bloated with whiskey, Marshall accidentally murders a man, precipitating a flight from the law that degenerates into a grotesque spree of burglary, rape, kidnapping and murder. Gabriel desperately wants to escape, but is prevented by Marshall's threats and the menacing presence of Caleb, a mute and shadowy figure. When Gabriel finally manages to free himself, the evil that he unwillingly witnessed follows him back homeAand threatens the people he loves most. Durham is a born storyteller: each step of Gabriel's descent into hell proceeds from the natural logic of the narrative itself, which manages to be inevitable even as it's totally surprising. Equally impressive is Durham's gift for describing the awful beauty of the American West: "The April sky was not a thing of air and gas," writes Durham. "Rather it lay like a solid ceiling of slate, pressing the living down into the prairie." The tale's racial dimension is subtly and intelligently developed, and though some readers may be turned off by the violence Gabriel witnesses, all will be impressed by Durham's maturity, skill and lovingly crafted prose. Agent, Sloan Harris. (Jan. 16) Forecast: Durham's view of 1800s history through the eyes of a hopeful African-American boy adds a new dimension to the perennially appealing theme of the lure of the West. Doubleday seems ready to get behind this novel with focused promotion, including an author tour; readers may take notice.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A Wild West debut: forced by his mother's remarriage to move from New York City to a sod house in Kansas, Gabriel decides to run away and become a cowboy.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The prodigal son returns
The prodigal son always comes home. Iin life, in parable and in literature.

And he has returned once more in "Gabriel's Story," a haunting debut by David Anthony Durham. In this incarnation, the wayward youth is a 15-year-old African-American boy in the empty middle of a continent, caught between youth and manhood, naiveté and wisdom, family and flight.

Fleeing racism in Reconstruction-era Baltimore, Gabriel Lynch travels with his mother and younger brother to his stepfather's hard-scrabble homestead in 1870s Kansas. As with the Biblical story of the prodigal son, Gabriel finds the "outside" world less exciting and more threatening than he dreamed. He returns to Kansas wiser and chastened, prepared to take his place behind the plow and, more importantly, at the family hearth. "Gabriel's Story" is a classical bildungsroman -- a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character -- told in masterful prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy.

His is not just a startlingly poetic African-American voice (Durham is the son of Trinidadian immigrants), but a welcome new voice in the rich spectrum of American letters, where authors should -- and must -- be judged in different shades of black and white: The color of words on a page.

Altogether a really good novel.
I picked up this book after reading the USA Today review, which was essentially an unconditional rave. I decided to give it a try, but figured I'd probably be disappointed, as few books live up to the praise heaped on them. But GABRIEL'S STORY was a pleasant surprise. It begins with vivid homesteading scenes - all the toil and the poverty of it. Makes me glad I wasn't a homesteader, and it made it reasonable that Gabriel would want to run away from it. The journey that he sets off on is truly engrossing, well-plotted, with beautiful language and great descriptions of the Western landscape.

It looks like the novel is being compared to Cormac McCarthy's work. There are some similarities, but GABRIEL'S STORY is a bit more hopeful than McCarthy's work. The world is still harsh and dangerous, but Durham seems to have more faith in humanity, in family and friends. Also, I thought it was interesting that the reviewer in USA Today said that he was a city-dwelling white guy that still got into this book about a black boy in another century out on the plains. I felt the same way. Yes, the main characters are black, but their racial identity is only part of the whole world of the story. They're black like James Joyce's characters are Irish or Faulkner's are Southern - it matters, but it doesn't change the fact that anybody can connect with them. Altogether a really good novel.

Many Levels, Many Reasons
Pretty much all the reviewers so far have loved this book. There's just one guy who dissented, but I guess there's always gonna be one that doesn't catch on. For my part, I'd like to join in the chorus of enthusiasm for this novel. It works, and it works on many levels. At the simplest level it's an adventure story. Woven into that is a coming of age tale. Layered on that is a dialogue between good and evil, between the best and worst in men's natures. Add the back and forth between the life of homesteaders and that of cowboys, two dual and sometimes dueling aspects of the American frontier experience. There's a young black man discovering the natural world and relating to it in a way I've never seen in African-American literature. There's the turmoil of a mother watching her young sons become men, for better and worse. There's the anguish of a man who's family has died tragically. There's the strange legacy of slavery as manifest through two characters who don't even understand how they fit into that tragedy.

All this and more can be found in this exceptional novel. I guess not everyone will engage with it so completely, but if any of these themes sound interesting to you I encourage you to delve into this book. It's all there, and an attentive reader will be well rewarded.