Summary
"[Paula] Saunders skillfully illuminates how time heals certain wounds while deepening others. . . . A mediation of the violence of American ambition."-- The New York Times Book Review
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE
"A deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family" (Jennifer Egan) about sibling rivalry, dark secrets, and a young girl's struggle with freedom and artistic desire
In the years after World War II, the bleak yet beautiful plains of South Dakota still embody all the contradictions--the ruggedness and the promise--of the old frontier. This is a place where you can eat strawberries from wild vines, where lightning reveals a boundless horizon, where descendants of white settlers and native Indians continue to collide, and where, for most, there are limited options.
René shares a home, a family, and a passion for dance with her older brother, Leon. Yet for all they have in common, their lives are on remarkably different paths. In contrast to René, a born spitfire, Leon is a gentle soul. The only boy in their ballet class, Leon silently endures often brutal teasing. Meanwhile, René excels at everything she touches, basking in the delighted gaze of their father, whom Leon seems to disappoint no matter how hard he tries.
As the years pass, René and Leon's parents fight with increasing frequency--and ferocity. Their father--a cattle broker--spends more time on the road, his sporadic homecomings both yearned for and dreaded by the children. And as René and Leon grow up, they grow apart. They grasp whatever they can to stay afloat--a word of praise, a grandmother's outstretched hand, the seductive attention of a stranger--as René works to save herself, crossing the border into a larger, more hopeful world, while Leon embarks on a path of despair and self-destruction.
Tender, searing, and unforgettable, The Distance Home is a profoundly American story spanning decades--a tale of haves and have-nots, of how our ideas of winning and losing, success and failure, lead us inevitably into various problems with empathy and caring for one another. It's a portrait of beauty and brutality in which the author's compassionate narration allows us to sympathize, in turn, with everyone involved.
"A riveting family saga for the ages . . . one of the best books I've read in years."--Mary Karr
"Saunders' debut is an exquisite, searing portrait of family and of people coping with whatever life throws at them while trying to keep close to one another."-- Booklist (starred review)
Author Notes
Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She is a graduate of the Syracuse University creative writing program, and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer chair Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Saunders debuts with a penetrating and insightful deconstruction of a Midwestern family. The story starts with Eve and Al, high school sweethearts who marry, have children, and find themselves mired in jealousy and misunderstanding. Throughout, Eve's indomitable spirit won't be quashed, no matter the conflicts or the despair that hover over her family. Firstborn Leon, an athlete with a penchant for ballet, is as opposite from his father as can be imagined. Middle child René, a fierce, competitive sprite, takes up ballet like her brother and can do no wrong in her father's eyes, much to Eve's consternation, whose heart lies with her first born. As the family moves from Missouri to South Dakota, where Al grows his cattle business and spends more time away from home, the story contrasts René, driven to achieve-despite the resentment it causes in everyone who crosses her path-and Leon, a misguided soul bearing his father's wrath. The sweet, easygoing youngest child, Jayne, doesn't get the same attention as the other characters. Still, Saunders brilliantly parses Leon and René's disparate paths; they are two wildly talented, sensitive souls-one shattered by life's circumstances, the other learning to soar above them. This debut wonderfully depicts the entire lifespan of a singular family. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The slow, punitive grind of family dynamics, even when leavened by love, contorts a Midwestern family.Where does all the hurt and anger go, wonders Ren, the lively, confident middle child, about her sad, victimized brother, Leon. Saunders' debut makes no bones about the answer to that question, illustrating in detail the sedimentary process of psychological damage inflicted on children by their parents, in this case Al and Eve. Married young in Fort Pierre, South Dakota, the couple settles, at first, in Al's parents' basement, Eve working two jobs, Ala cattle traderoften away on the road. Soon they have two children, Leon and Ren, later a third, Jayne, and money is tight. Set in the 1960s, the novel's world is remote and traditional, at least as represented by Al, whose pitiless response to his son's sensitivitiesa stutter; a startling gift for ballet dancingis knee-jerk harshness. Leon reacts by pulling out his hair and eyelashes and withdrawing from the family group, while Eve's attempts to defend him only result in arguments with her husband. Saunders avoids Leon's perspective, opting for Ren's instead. She too is warped by the constant tensions at home, becoming an overachiever whose will to excel leads to resentment and social rejection. Meanwhile, there's no respite for poor Leon, beaten by his father, assaulted by a stranger, and later sent to an abusive Catholic boarding school. Flashes forward confirm the inexorable outcome: Leon's future will be alcoholism, drugs, mental disease, and PTSD. Ren manages to escape, and Saunders suggests some healing balm in years to come, but not enough to displace the early, indelible harm.A grim, haunting parable of split child-rearing in which the dark blots out much of the light. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In mid-twentieth-century South Dakota, marrying at 18 signals the end of ambitious and overachieving Eve's dreams. Her husband, Al, a cattle broker, spends most of his nights on the road. When he's home, tension and arguments rule the house. When children arrive, they struggle to make a place for themselves in the family. The two eldest, Leon and Rene, find solace in a local dance class, its structure and discipline helping them navigate their rocky family life. Rene is as ambitious as her mother once was. Al basks in her success while berating Leon for his stutter and love of dance. Eve tries to smooth everything over, desperate to hang on to her volatile marriage to a man she loves and despises. Saunders' debut is an exquisite, searing portrait of family and of people coping with whatever life throws at them while trying to keep close to one another. This beautifully written novel takes readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions, delivering them to a place where painful memories live alongside hopes and dreams. The Distance Home will leave readers eager for more from this extraordinarily talented writer.--Gladstein, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In "The Distance Home," Paula Saunders's debut novel, family alliances ossify early. Al and Eve are the parents of young children when Al's mother, Emma, begins to favor the middle child, René, over her younger sister, Jayne, and her sensitive older brother, Leon. "The problem," Saunders writes, "which had started earlier - maybe even back before time itself - was that, as Emma was every day bringing René into her heart and holding her as the beloved, she was, in the same moment, handily evicting Leon." Al sides with his mother; Eve aligns herself with Leon and Jayne. And so the fault lines are drawn, the children made actors in a home as harsh and factious as the rural South Dakota landscape in which the novel is set. The family moves to the Black Hills above Rapid City, where Native and white populations live in uneasy proximity. By the 1960s, the indigenous people who inhabited the Black Hills for thousands of years have been confined, violated and stripped of their culture by the United States government. Just as discrimination and systemic inequality endure - reinforced by upwardly mobile whites like Al and Eve, who are all too happy to buy food cheaply "in the Indian part of town" but warn their children to stay away from Native classmates - so too does history shape the lives of Leon and René. This is particularly evident in the case of Leon: natural peacemaker, natural dancer, derided by his father for the latter as well as the "beautiful high cheekbones and broad nose of the Sioux" risen "from somewhere buried deep in the silence of the genetic line." Al, a second-generation cattle trader, has no framework for unconventional masculinity. Though he is frequently on the road - making Eve, in one of the novel's rich vernacular details, a "grass widow" - he disdains Leon at home. Leon's torment is expressed first through a stutter and later through trichotillomania (pulling his hair out), but he remains tenderhearted, quick to defend his sister at school despite her privilege at home. Leon and René's sole parity exists in the realm of dance: Naturally talented, they excel in the region's only elite ballet academy. Through ballet, as unusual in midcentury South Dakota as Leon himself, Saunders explores the extent to which it is possible to escape one's circumstances. The siblings' dance instructor argues that although it rose "from the basest limits of our existence ... ballet was nothing less than the one pure expression of humankind's ability to transcend." Her optimism mirrors the up-by-your-bootstraps narrative that's core to a mythic version of America, one that's accessible to very few. I couldn't help feeling disappointed, then, that the novel's exploration of prejudice and vulnerability remains incomplete. Early on, Leon's struggle to escape his environment is compared to that of Native Americans: "Leon was in a fight just like the Indians - a fight he hadn't asked for, didn't understand, and couldn't win.... He was going to lose, and it wasn't going to be fair or just or right." Saunders movingly explores the difficulty of changing one's course in the face of accumulated trauma, but the deeper implications of this rather delicate analogy to Native American experience remain unclear. Posing Leon as a subtle proxy for indigenity risks an oversimplified equivalence - unexpected in a novel sensitive to imbalance. Still, Saunders skillfully illuminates how time heals certain wounds while deepening others, and her depiction of aging is viscerally affecting. As Leon's life tunnels toward its inevitable conclusion, "The Distance Home" becomes a meditation on the violence of American ambition - and a powerful call for self-examination. René is pained by her brother's suffering, "but when it came to sacrificing something for Leon, it always seemed to René like there was an answer she couldn't remember or that she'd never known in the first place. ... And mostly, she was watching out for her own skin." It's easy to hold Leon's family in contempt. More difficult - and, as this compassionate novel implies, more important - is to acknowledge in ourselves the combination of fear and complacency that prevents those of us who know better from acting like it. CHLOE BENJAMIN is the author of "The Immortalists" and "The Anatomy of Dreams."
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Saunders's bleak story begins after World War II on the isolated South Dakota plains, where childhood friends Eve and Al begin married life in a basement apartment in his parents' house. Al joins his father in the cattle brokerage business. His extensive travels mean that Eve alone must create a life for children Leon, René, and Jayne. She sends clumsy Leon to tap dance, then ballet lessons, joined by René. Al is enraged over their son taking ballet; he also ignores Leon's baseball accomplishments, driving his son into embarrassing stuttering and self-destructive behavior until he leaves home after failing high school. Meanwhile, René refuses to be pulled down by small-town conformity, eventually finding artistic success in New York. Disconnected from her origins as the family disintegrates, she finally prays that angels will "carry each of them...to wherever it was they all needed to go." VERDICT Drawing on Saunders's own family history, this debut novel captures the underlying turmoil of a dysfunctional family at war with themselves while hiding secrets from their past. The author's compassion for her characters shines through in this honest story. [See Prepub Alert, 2/19/18.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.