The Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 remains one of the most crucial, and yet occluded and misunderstood, periods of modern Korean history. Often painted in black-and-white terms, the oppressive brutality of the Japanese is decried with righteous indignation, while the heroic resistance of the Korean people is extolled. Yet, other domestic struggles within Korean society — internal political divisions, the exploitation of commoners by the yangban (aristocracy), their active collaboration with the Japanese, the existence of slaves, the patriarchal family structure that enabled Korean men to have several wives, etc. — all get swept under the rug. Thus, how ordinary Koreans lived their daily lives during this time remains something of a mystery, erased under the broad brushstrokes of a nationalist Korean discourse that would rather paint a simplistic picture in which all Koreans were innocent victims of Japanese subjugation.

Which is why the publication of an English-language translation of Three Generations is so important. Originally published in 1931 by the Korean writer Yom Sang-seop as Samdae, the novel is considered a classic today and a source of national pride for having been published during one of the darkest times in Korean history. By focusing on the domestic drama that takes place within the Jo family, the novel reveals the reality that, to some extent, virtually all Koreans had to compromise themselves under the colonial system, and the characters are refreshingly free of the exaggerated nationalism that emerged after liberation from Japan in 1945. Yom’s characters are simply immersed in their lives, and while Japan’s sinister presence lurks in the background as a pervasive reality, the tensions dealing with tradition versus modernity are grounded in the everyday. Some of the main characters speak Japanese and deal with the Japanese authorities simply as an accepted fact of life. The main protagonist, for example, is a student at a Japanese university, something that is presented as a matter of fact. Thus, the tensions depicted here lie not in resisting the Japanese, but in how the traditional Korean family structure that is steeped in strict Confucian values finds its very foundations falling apart in the face of Western and Japanese encroachment as Korea marches to modernity.

The title refers to the three men of the affluent Jo household. The stubborn grandfather, referred to as the “old man,” sees no value in Christianity or Western education if it means abandoning his cherished Confucian values: “If any bastard dared to offer up a Christian prayer for him after his death, he’d retrace his steps from the underworld and rip out the rogue’s tongue with his own hands.”

His estranged son, Sang-hun, is a 40-year-old, respected Christian church leader who has one foot in tradition and the other in modernity, but is ultimately unable to make the transition. Sang-hun considers himself a “modern” man, but he is still dependent upon the family’s finances for his livelihood. He is the rich, useless son of an outdated Confucian patriarchal system, relegated to playing cards, getting drunk and wasting time at kisaeng houses.

The bulk of the novel, however, focuses on the grandson, Deok-gi, “a young master struggling to hold the family together — a household whose foundations were crumbling and whose divisions were growing deeper.” Deok-gi must negotiate his way among the men and women who infect the home with suspicion and jealousy in their struggles to exert power over the family. Meanwhile, Deok-gi’s best friend, Byoeng-hwa, and Gyeong-ae, his father’s mistress, become involved in a revolutionary movement that indirectly draws the Jo family into its sphere. Gyeong-ae, who has fallen to the status of a hardened bar hostess in order to support her illegitimate daughter, is depicted with surprising earthiness and toughness — a strong Korean woman who refuses to capitulate to the whims of the Jo family men. Byeong-hwa, a poor Marxist activist secretly under Japanese surveillance, reflects the social edge of the novel as he struggles with his own personal ambitions with the greater social good.

Readers may be surprised at Yom’s depiction of married men falling in love with other women, but this reflects the patriarchal society of the time. Deok-gi, already married with a child though barely out of high school, finds himself in love with a young factory girl named Pil-sun. His father, in a loveless marriage since the age of 10, deals with his heartache over Gyeong-ae by having yet another affair. The novel, filled with gossip and family intrigue as scandalous as any contemporary soap opera, reads deliciously like a Dostoevsky novel or Les Liaisons Dangereuse meets Korea’s traditional middle class.

Yom’s depiction of his characters struggling to live during colonial Korea seems strikingly relevant, even tragically prescient. One character, speaking of Korea’s difficulty in modernizing without comprising its values, states: “True, but such scruples are unnecessary in the case of Korea, where there’s no organizational base and where the use of illegitimate means is inevitable.” He could just as well have been speaking of the justifications made about South Korea’s brutal post-war development in the 1960s and beyond.

As you become engrossed in the family drama, you wonder how the family will be able to heal the divisions. With a start, you realize that the unwitting characters are fatefully destined to confront the cataclysmic horror of the Korean War, a tragic event where the larger social tensions are finally allowed to explode. Three Generations is an important work for revealing how political, social and cultural tensions played out in the lives of families during the colonial period, tensions which remain with Korea even today.

 

The three-generation saga is a Korean narrative tradition that dates back to the nation’s very first story, that of the country’s mythical founder, Dangun. And for some five thousand years, countless grandfather-father-son generations have kept this epic tradition alive, each representing the obstacles, failures, and triumphs of their times. Yom Sang-Seop’s novel Three Generations, written in Korean in 1931 and now available in English, is a modern take on the ancient form. It is set in the bustling yet mundane Seoul of the ’30s, when Korea had submitted to more than twenty years of Japanese colonial rule. In the book’s opening, Yom introduces fundamental generational schisms along with growing social divisions. As Deok-gi prepares to return to school in Tokyo (his procrastination in departing will take up a third of the plot), his grandfather, the Confucian patriarch of the affluent Jo family, levels a petty judgment against Deok-gi’s friend. “His hair is a mess,” he declares of the penniless Marxist. Yet the old man’s complaints cannot stem the flow of time, nor the changes that accompany it; the novel follows him beyond his deathbed to the tensions surrounding the inheritance, not only of his riches but of his lineage and beliefs. The old man’s estranged son, Sang-hun, is unsuitable for carrying on the legacy (in addition to being a liberal, womanizer, and skeptic, he’s a Christian who refuses ancestral worship); trapped in his own contradictions, Sang-hun is part of the generation caught between the traditional, premodern Korea and this modernized but colonialized country in which new hope must be made. The fortune – and the burden – falls to the grandson, and when the grandfather passes away on lunar New Year, Deok-gi is left with a cumbersome set of keys in his hands. Born in 1897, Yom was a prolific pioneer of Western-style realism in Korean literature, and of his many novels and stories, Three Generations is his most widely read work, vividly capturing the cultural, moral, and political complexities of the Japanese colonial period through the urban microcosms of bars, stores, noodle shops, streets crowded with trolleys and rickshaws, and centuries-old mansions. Much of his narrative voice, a delicate mix of social satire and psychological depth, relies on nuanced exchanges among Seoul’s social classes – factory girls, cosmopolitan independence fighters, money-blind concubines, suffering servants, suspicious wives, Tokyo-educated elites – presented in their distinctive dialects. For Korean readers, this is where the book’s true pleasure lies. Translating the book poses a tremendous challenge. Yu Young-nan has produced a fluid, faithful, and very readable version of the novel. But when it comes to dialogue – for instance, the flirtatious bickering between Deok-gi’s Marxist friend and his friend’s love interest, an enlightened bar girl – the texture feels a bit too bland and the tempo has been slowed. Nevertheless, the three-generation saga, ancient or modern, is a structure that promises continuity, as well as historical perspective. It comes as no surprise, then, that Three Generations, written as an examination of the author’s colonized and anxious homeland, continues to resonate some seventy years later.

 

The main representatives of the three generations Yom Sang-seop’s novel centres around are the head of the Jo family, the dying grandfather, his son Sang-hun, and Sang-hun’s son Deok-gi. Set during the Japanese occupation of Korea between the World Wars, it is a family saga, the focal transition being between generations as the grandfather’s strong hold on the family fades with his illness and is then followed by the struggle for the inheritance when he dies.

Deok-gi is a student in Japan — or tries to be one, as the pressing family business tends to keep him in Seoul. He is to be his grandfather’s heir and take over the family, as his own father has proven not to be entirely trustworthy and, having embraced Christianity, has turned away from tradition (unwilling, for example, to participate in some of the family rituals). Sang-hun is a somewhat dissolute figure, and among his less honourable deeds was an affair with young Gyeong-ae. He pretty much abandoned her when she became pregnant, and when Deok-gi — a former schoolmate of Gyeong-ae’s — runs into her at the beginning of the novel the child is already five.

Another significant figure is Deok-gi’s friend, Byeong-hwa. Also the son of a Christian, he broke with his father, refusing to even pretend to be an obedient son and do vaguely as his father wants. With no one to pay for his studies, he is down on his luck, and is active in a radical movement.

Byeong-hwa lives with the family of Pil-sun, a young woman Deok-gi is attracted to (and wants to be of help to), while Byeong-hwa is drawn to Gyeong-ae — who, in turn, still wonders whether she can’t get Sang-hun to at least assume some responsibility for his daughter.

Aside from this, there are quite a few hangers-on at the grandfathers house, including the manipulative concubine, the Suwon woman, trying to position herself to be able to cash in on his death. The household is an often unpleasant place of mutual suspicion and personal strife, most everyone looking out almost only for themselves. The grandfather, trying to hold on to tradition, is slipping away too fast to still have much influence, while the heir, Deok-gi, tries to balance everything — a daunting task and a responsibility he isn’t all that enthusiastic about assuming. Undermined by his father and others, Deok-gi doesn’t have it easy (and throughout would prefer just to be able to get on with his studies in Japan).

Byeong-hwa’s (and the family of Pil-sun’s) revolutionary activities are never really spelt out, and only in an attempt to embrace what looks like a more comfortable but very bourgeois existence does it come to a violent confrontation with the (very unimpressive) revolutionaries. While Byeong-hwa eventually explains that his foray into capitalism is meant to provide a safety net for the comrades and the movement, he is clearly also torn between complete devotion to the cause and a simpler, more traditional lifestyle.

Meanwhile, Deok-gi is concerned that his feelings for Pil-sun will lead him to become no better than his father. Already married, and with a small child, taking up with with Pil-sun would seem too much like he was following in his father’s footsteps (who at first also only meant to help Gyeong-ae and her family through hard times).

The novel covers a fairly brief period of time, but one of considerable transition: family heads die, younger generations take a lead in providing for family. Meanwhile, the political situation mirrors the confrontation between generations, the rigid state (foreign-dominated as it also is, by the Japanese) being challenged — largely ineffectively — by several of the characters.

The most impressive aspect of the novel is the characters, nicely and gradually built up through conversation and their actions. The free-spirited and independent Gyeong-ae, the softer Pil-sun, and the stunningly self-centred Sang-hun are among the vivid figures Yom presents.

There’s a great deal of dialogue in the book, much of it in the form of playful banter and teasing, even about serious subjects. Expectations and traditional ways do not permit for clear communication: it’s rare that a character will actually say what is on his or her mind, helping muddle matters much more — and making for some frustration for the reader.

The police state intrudes more decisively in the novel’s climax, but Yom leaves much unresolved — an anticlimactic wind-up that is a bit disappointing. Nevertheless, Three Generations is an impressive and evocative account of Seoul life in the 1920s (or early 1930s), with a solid cast of engaging characters. Somewhat rough around the edges — the individual scenes are handled much better than the overarching story — it is still well worthwhile, an enjoyable and quite fast-moving big read.

 

In UK literature, authors such as Joanna Trollope are said to be writers of the “AGA Saga.” Named for the AGA brand stove, the AGA saga typically concerns the domestic difficulties of a comfortable family in a middle-class or upper-middle class household. Until its conclusion, another example would seem to be Yom Sang-seop’s Three Generations, which follows the changes in a wealthy Korean family under Japanese occupation.

Three Generations covers an exceptionally eventful few months. Most of the novel concerns the Jo family, prosperous but troubled rice magnates. They are a big clan, with interlocking generational ties, multiple wives and concubines, and a lively staff of servants. Each member of the household has a life outside the immediate household, making the Jos less the main characters than a lens through which readers enjoy the full range of 1930’s Korea.

In this world, social standing matters more than appearance and conduct. Clothing is a vital indicator, as is mode of speech. If readers have difficulty engaging this book, it will likely stem from two factors: the foreign names and the foreign culture. Were this a movie, Hollywood would remake it with Martin and Sue instead of Deok-gi & Deok-hui, and while we filthy capitalists can relate to the role money plays in relationships, for example the uneasiness and loaded banter of a friendship between a child of privilege and a broke dreamer, the importance of Korean class construction, interwoven with specific notions of honor, or “face,” takes getting used to.

Can you reach outside your own experience? If you do, you will be rewarded by a lusty soap-opera rife with drinking, brawling, infidelity, and wrangling over a rich man’s will, despicable, familiar humanity that transcends any cultural divide. You will find yourself riveted, gasping at the plot twists and explaining urgently to your loved one the conspiracy this or that servant has entered into with a third wife to usurp an absent grandson’s share of inheritance. While valuable to its originating nation as a document of the political and social times, the real meat of this novel is the timeless conflict and confluence among strong personalities born into differing social strata. When rendered with understanding and humor, as this is, it makes for a ripping read.

One of the many compelling non-Jos, Byeong-hwa, begins the book as a lovable good-for-nothing but develops in complex ways; we experience his transition from adolescent idealism into compromised adulthood. Sang-hun, a pious whoremonger and self-righteous drunkard, a hypocrite of the first order, begins as a sympathetic buffoon, but loses our sympathy as his vices transform him into a sinister foil for the virtuous Deok-gi.

Yu Young-nan’s translation is clean and helpful, cluing us into nuances such as the particular grammar with which one individual addresses another and its implications. If Yu’s work lapses occasionally into literalism — “There is saying: once burned, doubly reticent” — it can be fairly said that Yom Sang-seop has written an unusually literal novel. When a character observes that God is “a witness equal to a million mortals,” it has the ring of an actual equation, etched in a ledger somewhere.

Let the reader of Three Generations never forget, however, the realities of life under a foreign power’s military occupation. No one is ever more than a breath from Long Kesh or Abu Ghraib. Part of this book’s historical weight is the casual, horrifying abuse of Koreans by the occupying Japanese. Korean men and women are routinely taken into police custody on pretense, then raped and otherwise brutalized for days, sometimes never released. Readers unmindful of this history will be shaken and badly upset by chapters late in the book. Three Generations ends in an orgy of totalitarian cruelty, a sort of Diabolus ex machina that imposes itself unexpectedly, derailing the pending narrative conclusion and leaving many important characters invisible, prisoners without names in cells without numbers.

 

The endless possibilities for employment and prosperity after World War I slowly begin to crumble in the Great Depression. Indeed, symbolically and potently, Joseph Coulson describes the summer of 1931 as the “season of dying trees.” Stephen and Phil Tollman heroically but ineffectively attempt to prevent the disintegration of their family in the midst of economic ruin, physical illness, tragedy and increasing despair. Vanishing Moon is the lyrical account of the Tollman family’s demise, but it is so beautifully crafted that one keeps turning the pages rapidly; that is, when one isn’t stopping to ponder its poignantly poetic phrases and sentences depicting the scenery and dynamic characters. Stephen possesses the most vivid narrative voice as he tells the tale of love and hate toward a father who loses the family’s money, and who cannot prevent a mother’s pending blindness nor a rebel brother’s increasing and unresolved fury at “a life that demanded commitment but offered no guarantees because we are bound to promises that living will not let us keep.” One also learns of the progressive history of the American railroad industry within these pages, the patriotic American response to World War II, and the rise of the unconventional feminine personality that refuses to conform to the expected social values of the time. A waxing and waning thread persists in comparing the two brothers whose sensitivity or lack thereof determines the resolution of so much pain prevalent throughout the entire story. Indeed, one must acknowledge it symbolic of what all of America was experiencing at that time.

 

In an era when Donald Trump is king, and the stars of unreality TV shows earn more by gobbling insects than Mark Twain ever banked, we need talented novelists to explore the less affluent ZIP codes of America. First-timer Joseph Coulson does the job so well he is already being compared to James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy) and other skilled chroniclers of working-class life.

But Studs and his hard-bitten gang were prep-school dandies compared to the Tollman family whom Mr. Coulson follows across five decades from the 1930s to the late 1970s. Driven into poverty and homelessness by the Depression, the Tollmans endure winters outside Cleveland in an Army surplus tent with no electricity or running water. As Stephen (sensitive, open) and older brother Phillip (angry, opaque) struggle to protect their younger siblings from schoolyard cruelty and greater threats, their mother slowly goes blind. The family lacks money for medical care, and what little they have is soon squandered by the boys’ ineffectual father, who then vanishes from their lives.

Mr. Coulson creates multiple views of the Tollmans as poverty, disgrace and, surprisingly, love erode the family’s bonds. As young men, both Phillip and Stephen fall for Katherine Lennox, a gifted pianist and dabbler in socialist causes whose narrative turn takes us deeper into the brothers’ psyches as she gives her body to one, her mind to the other. With World War II looming, Katherine breaks Stephen’s heart by choosing Phillip, who in turn devastates her by escaping into the military.

Fast-forward 20 years and more, and we see what tragedy plus time have done to the brothers, Phillip, though more prosperous than his father, is a mocking, abusive alcoholic at war with the ’60s, with racially mixed Detroit, and with his son James, an aspiring writer who sums up Phillip’s creed:

Manhood, for him, meant living without sympathy, compassion, or forbearance. It demanded a bitter kind of silence, the strength to show now weakness, to suffer alone and to leave alone those who suffer.

Stephen, by contrast, isn’t afraid to show that he’s vulnerable and does not with to suffer alone, though readers may wonder if his intelligence and sympathy bring him more harm than good. Stephen’s attempted reunion with Katherine, now a nightclub entertainer, makes up one of the novel’s most affecting scenes.

A rich, variegated book, The Vanishing Moon meditates on family, need and the collision of personality with history. Joseph Coulson’s impressive first novel should leave his readers eager for a second.

 

Written in lyrical yet quickly paced prose that carries the reader from the Great Depression through the Nixon presidency, this first novel follows a working-class family as the hapless father loses his job, forcing a move into a tent in rural Ohio. The mother gradually goes blind, her condition untreated because the family can’t afford medical care. Burdened by guilt, the father disappears. These events and more are narrated in four sections, the first and last compassionately told by second-oldest son Stephen. As children, Stephen and older brother Phil are inseparable, but Phil’s festering bitterness lends the novel an increasingly dark and brooding tone. The story continues in the voice of Katherine, a young woman who becomes involved with both Stephen and Phil; the story is then taken up in the turbulent Sixties by Phil’s son, James, who witnesses his father’s descent into alcoholism. The narrative is uneven but rich in historical context; Coulson movingly evokes the feel of Rust Belt cities in hard times. Recommended for larger fiction collections.

 

Consider, for a moment, the people around you. How would you look — who would you be — if your soul and character existed only through their eyes? In poet Joseph Coulson’s debut novel, The Vanishing Moon (Archipelago) this is the way we meet Phil Tollman — through a younger brother, an abandoned lover, and a teenage son. The Phil Tollman we see is at times adoring, brave, disillusioned, drunken, and belligerent; a melancholy figure defined by the choices he makes — and those he leaves unmade. With finely crafted characters and scenery, Coulson’s epic depicts the working-class world of Cleveland and Detroit, following the Tollman family from the Great Depression through World War II to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The graceful prose tenderly builds a story of humanity and tragedy. In the Tollman’s world, reality can be as dark as a moonless sky, lit only by memories and dreams unrealized.

 

Loss saturates Joseph Coulson’s new novel, The Vanishing Moon. This chronicle of three generations of a Midwestern working-class family opens in the Depression, with the Tollmans having had to leave their home in Cleveland and stay in a tent on the outskirts of town, and closes in the era of Nixon and Vietnam, with the sundering of brothers Stephen and Phil Tollman.

A tale punctuated by vanishing loved ones, desires and possibilities could become drearily repetitious, but Coulson’s richly-textured narrative abounds in passion and wonder. Loss may be catastrophic, but for Coulson it is never final. His real subject is not loss but the art of losing, the infinitely varied ways in which people try to live on in the wake of loss.

The Vanishing Moon offers a deliberately different portrayal of American working-class life. No strikes, no scenes of factory drudgery or tyrannical bosses, no urban slums: Instead, the focus is on familial relations, which Coulson develops with such complexity and density that the Tollmans are never reduced to symbolic pawns of an unjust system.

This unconventional emphasis is apparent in the novel’s opening. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrathmay have led us to expect that we know what it’s like to be forced out of your home during the Depression, but nothing I have read prepared me for Coulson’s patient reimagining of the Tollmans’ life. Told in the voice of younger brother Stephen, growing up in a tent near the Chagrin River (no joke!) appears surprisingly similar to growing up elsewhere. There are adventures in the woods, odd jobs, snow angels, a crush on a grade school teacher, fiery brother Phil’s terrible revenge on the kids who tormented their speech-impaired little brother Myron, and a creepy old guy who lives in a shack near the river. Stephen’s recollection of winter illustrates the larger balance that Coulson strikes:

We ate summer vegetables and fruit that Mother canned in the fall, and we froze fish and venison, gifts from the Johnson farm, in a metal can outside the tent. Snow in a bucket kept milk and cheese cold. Sometimes, when the temperature rose just above freezing, the tent was almost cozy, except that my hands were never warm.”

Coulson is particularly interested in the spiritual and emotional losses that follow from material deprivation. Mother’s blindness, Myron’s speech impediment and Phil’s eventual deafness correspond to a larger pattern of constricted possibility. Loss makes and unmakes each of Moon’s large cast of absorbing characters. The feckless father’s abandonment strengthens the bond between Stephen and Phil, the remaining men of the family, for instance, but it also sharpens their disagreements. Phil hates and dismisses the father, while Stephen lives in anticipation of his return. Some of Stephen’s most appealing traits are reinforced in reaction to such losses: He is the one who remembers, who cares, who makes an effort to maintain family ties as an adult.

At the same time, this posture proves debilitating. He loses his true love Katherine to his more intense brother Phil, one feels, because he has chosen to wait and remember he is ill-equipped to pursue his own desires in the present. He then waits for Katherine long after, to much the same effect.

At its best, The Vanishing Moon works by re-creation, taking a set of abstractly familiar stories and telling them with such vividness and emotional torque that they become new again. The entire second section, told by Katherine, a pianist who moves in communist circles but follows only the promptings of her heart, is of this order. Katherine’s electric intelligence is fascinating in its own right, and because she is in many respects Stephen’s opposite, her perceptions of the Tollmans consistently expose new facets.

I found the third section, told by Phil’s teenage son James in the Detroit of the 1960s and ’70s, authentic but not as fresh. The period references to rock bands and draft resistance and race riots are more familiar; more importantly, James resembles his decent, sensitive Uncle Stephen in temperament, and Phil’s story comes to dominate the whole. Phil’s decline into hardhearted fury, paranoia and alcoholism is convincing, but too much like a slow-motion train wreck to elicit much more than pity and, I suspect, too narrow to carry Coulson’s more ambitious commentary on this phase of U.S. history. The return of Stephen to narrate the final section is refreshing, not because the Tollmans’ problems are solved or Stephen’s scars are healed, but because he has achieved a rare kind of integrity, “ruined but unvanquished.”

Elizabeth Bishop wrote: “The art of losing’s not too hard to master.” Coulson’s novel is alive to the ironies of this promise. The Tollmans get entirely too much practice in the art, and their mastery sometimes exacerbates their pain. The Vanishing Moon saves their stories, in mourning and in celebration, with an art of remarkable poignancy.

Doug Payne teaches English at USD.

 

Family snapshots—A poignant portrait of each succeeding decade

“Most things that die wither away or we put them underground, but trees stay standing, rows of barren trunks that creak and moan until the onslaught of rain and snow finally brings them down. Trees return slowly to the earth, and so the stubborn shadows of their dissolution darkened our childhood games.”

The many resplendent, impactive passages in Joseph Coulson’s novel, The Vanishing Moon, make it easy to believe that he is a seasoned poet. Coulson does in fact have three books of poetry under his belt. The power of the book’s engaging epic story would also suggest that Coulson is a veteran novelist, but that is not the case. This is the East Bay writer’s first novel.

Born in 1957 in Detroit, Coulson earned a Ph.D. in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the early to mid-’90s, he taught at Marin Academy and served as chair of the English department. He founded Marin Academy’s Literary Festival in 1992. Although Coulson may not seem as fascinating as today’s hip, young writing phenoms who appear out of nowhere and who we in the media love to make our darlings, he possesses something uniquely exhilarating for a newbie novelist substantial life and literary experience. His affecting novel has already been honored by the Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Program.

The Vanishing Moon follows the lives of the Tollmans, a working-class family from the Midwest, through three generations. It starts at the beginning of the Great Depression and ends during the Vietnam War era. The Tollman family saga is told primarily from the perspective of three narrators and occurs during four distinct periods in the 20th century. Theirs is a dramatic, tragedy-filled tale, and one that thoughtfully explores concepts of family, history and memory. The plot is wrenching enough to be a page-turner, yet genuine enough to make a profound impression without being overly moralistic.

Playing the most significant roles in the novel are brothers Stephen and Phil Tollman. Only 18 months apart in age, they share many adventures and much suffering while growing up in the Cleveland area. Together they climb trees, take care of their siblings, watch their mother go blind, lose their tormented father and fall in love with the same woman. Their experiences and paths are at once similar and divergent. As they age, they find it difficult to break free from the tragic moments of their past. In spite of his intentions, Stephen stagnates. An emotionally lost Phil simply unravels. Through the course of the novel, we experience the world of their loved ones as well, which sheds further light on the lives of the brothers.

There is a great deal of sadness in Coulson’s work and the conclusion isn’t exactly uplifting. Still, it’s more gratifying than depressing. He does a wonderful job of putting the Tollmans’ lives in historical and political context. Jumping between a variety of characters, Coulson essentially fills the book with a series of striking snapshots. He poignantly captures the mood of the different time periods the family lives through.

Coming from Detroit myself, I was especially impressed and touched by Coulson’s portraits of the city circa 1968 a time when the place still had life left in it. From factory-town lifestyles and views on Catholicism to the excitement over boats and Tigers baseball, he gets Detroit’s personality just right.

Coulson loses a bit of steam and lyrical zip as he winds the story down. The conclusion is a tad rushed, not as fully fleshed out as I hoped it would be. I wish we had gotten a chance to know Stephen even better. In spite of these points, overall Coulson has created a successful and meaningful first novel one of the best first novels I’ve read. It is gripping and it is moving. I found myself continuing to mourn the Tollman family’s losses and wishing they could have moved beyond their pain.