A Family Warning: Blake Johnson's Prodigal: An American Parable
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
It’s hard to capture the feeling of Prodigal: An American Parable by Blake Johnson published by Trouble Department because it is a genuine original. It’s gothic and familial and real. No doubt, the author is a talent.
Listen—this book is a letter, father to son. And there is a generational problem here. An inability to escape. The narrative centers on the “son” and the “brother” and “the father” and “the uncle.” Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is a story of the boy and the man. The father warns the son to never return (break the prodigal cycle), but what happens when the escape leads to ruin too?
Never have I seen such a cerebral and gothic look at generational curse and the pull of home and the call of a life elsewhere. It is a story of acts described aptly in the first pages: “it didn’t feel good but it felt right.”
I’ve left home and broken the generational yoke of blue collar labor jobs the men who came before me worked hard at all their lives. Leaving doesn’t always feel good. Tearing at the family’s firmly rooted foundations doesn’t feel good. But sometimes it seems like the right move.
Once one is gone, all that’s left is the return. And like Travis Henderson wandering out of the desert to return and reunite his family in Paris, Texas, we bring the gone experience back with us. Especially the very tragic. We are changed by it. This is certainly the father’s warning to the son at the beginning and end of Johnson’s beautiful novel.
Blake Johnson has somehow captured these gut tensions and put it into a family tale that reminds one not only of the best of McCarthy, but also Philipp Meyer’s American Rust that propels characters forward when from the very beginning we somehow want them to pause for their own good—something ominous is around the corner. Death is coming. The reading of Johnson’s fiction here is breathless.
And the reading of Johnson’s Prodigal is highly recommended.
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
It’s hard to capture the feeling of Prodigal: An American Parable by Blake Johnson published by Trouble Department because it is a genuine original. It’s gothic and familial and real. No doubt, the author is a talent.
Listen—this book is a letter, father to son. And there is a generational problem here. An inability to escape. The narrative centers on the “son” and the “brother” and “the father” and “the uncle.” Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is a story of the boy and the man. The father warns the son to never return (break the prodigal cycle), but what happens when the escape leads to ruin too?
Never have I seen such a cerebral and gothic look at generational curse and the pull of home and the call of a life elsewhere. It is a story of acts described aptly in the first pages: “it didn’t feel good but it felt right.”
I’ve left home and broken the generational yoke of blue collar labor jobs the men who came before me worked hard at all their lives. Leaving doesn’t always feel good. Tearing at the family’s firmly rooted foundations doesn’t feel good. But sometimes it seems like the right move.
Once one is gone, all that’s left is the return. And like Travis Henderson wandering out of the desert to return and reunite his family in Paris, Texas, we bring the gone experience back with us. Especially the very tragic. We are changed by it. This is certainly the father’s warning to the son at the beginning and end of Johnson’s beautiful novel.
Blake Johnson has somehow captured these gut tensions and put it into a family tale that reminds one not only of the best of McCarthy, but also Philipp Meyer’s American Rust that propels characters forward when from the very beginning we somehow want them to pause for their own good—something ominous is around the corner. Death is coming. The reading of Johnson’s fiction here is breathless.
And the reading of Johnson’s Prodigal is highly recommended.