Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Lott, B. 2008 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the bestselling author ofJewelandThe Difference Between Women and Mencomes a haunting novel of home, family, and the pursuit of lost dreams.Ancient Highwaybrilliantly weaves together the hopes and regrets of three characters from three generations as they reconcile who they are and who they might have been. In 1925, a fourteen-year-old boy leaves his family's farm and hops a boxcar in a dusty Texas field, heading for Hollywood and a life in the "flickers." In 1947, a ten-year-old girl aches for a real home with a real family in a wide-open space, far from the crowded Los Angeles streets where her handsome cowboy father chases stardom and her mother holds a secret. In 1980, a young man just out of the Navy visits his elderly yet colorful grandparents in Los Angeles, eager to uncover his family's silent history. For the Holmeses, a longing for something else--another place, a second chance--seems to run in the family DNA. From Earl's journey west toward Hollywood glory, to his daughter Joan's wish for a normal existence away from the bright lights, to his grandson Brad's yearning for truth, this deep-rooted desire sustains them, no matter how much the goal eludes them. But ultimately, in each generation, a family crisis forces a turning away from the horizon and the acceptance of a reality that is by turns harsh and healing. Inspired by stories of his own family, Bret Lott beautifully renders the lives of ordinary people with extraordinary faith in a mesmerizing and finely wrought tale of love and letting go. Praise forAncient Highway "A chance to visit a country of grace where the twisted roads of American literature seldom lead us . . . We can only admire the way Lott . . . creates and differentiates so many characters and sets them into action so naturally." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "Bret Lott's writings tell us about the value of family, even when those relationships burst at their psychic seams. Mostly, though, Lott's fiction takes us into a world marked by traditional values of lasting love, honor and respect. . . . Lott's majestic prose, with its biblical cadences, further distinguishes this capacious parable of enduring grace and love." --The Charlotte Observer
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lott picks up the themes that dominated his 1999 Oprah Book Club Selection, Jewel, in this multigenerational saga. In 1927, 14-year-old Earl Holmes runs away from his unhappy home in Hawkins, Tex., for Hollywood to become a movie star. But poor bumpkin Earl has better luck in marrying big band singer Saralee Kennedy than he ever does building his acting resume. Earl and Saralee's only child, Joan, grows up to resent her father's dogged pursuit of a practically nonexistent film career at the expense of his family's happiness. She has plenty of her own residual problems by the time she has her son, Brad, who joins the navy and returns in 1980 to live with his grandparents, Earl and Saralee, in L.A. Estranged from Joan, Brad takes it upon himself to heal the family's rifts. The colorful off-camera anecdotes of filmmaking are gems, particularly how Earl lands a bit role in a forgettable Three Stooges skit. This chronicle of the Holmes family is sluggish in spots, but Lott's handling of characters and domestic conflicts picks up for readers who stick through the first act. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Lott is at his best writing about ordinary working people whose lives fall short of their expectations, and here he describes three members of a multigenerational family with issues of truth and illusion. At 11, Earl Holmes falls in love with the flickers, and at 14, he leaves his unhappy Texas home for Hollywood. Scrambling for parts, the handsome Earl continues his sidewalk screen tests in hopes of being seen after marrying singer Saralee Kennedy. Their only child, Joan, feeling surrounded by her parents' secret pasts and exploited for her father's future, flees to make an unwise marriage, becoming estranged from her son, Brad, who runs away to the navy while remaining close to his grandparents. Lott mixes persons and chronology in the stories of Earl, Joan, and Brad, tying them together in a sad yet hopeful reconciliation. The real strength of this book lies in its vivid set pieces, among them Brad's observation of Vietnamese evacuees on the deck of his ship and Earl's getting a bit part in a Three Stooges short; the strength of such pieces alone is worth the price.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Earl Holmes is mortified when he goes to his first movie, in a small Texas town in the early 1920s, and the usher rips his ticket in half. Surely it's confirmation that going to the "flickers" is a sin. But then he decides this "humiliation" is part of the ritual and slips into the darkened theater for "Folly of Vanity" with Billie Dove. Just three years later, completely in thrall to the silent screen, he's hopping a freight train for Los Angeles and the hardscrabble life of an actor. Decades later, Earl's 15-year-old grandson, Brad, runs away from his home in Phoenix, in flight from his emotionally unavailable mother and a house that was "starving from the inside out, it seemed to me, for something alive." Brad follows the same trail to Los Angeles, where his grandparents provide the love and acceptance they could never give their estranged daughter. Brett Lott's seventh novel, "Ancient Highway," explores the failed dreams and rifts in three generations of the Holmes family, tracing their hesitant movement toward reconciliation. But these winning characters are often mired in less than winning prose. Early on, Lott's lengthy, breathless, repetitive sentences convincingly evoke young Earl's optimism as he's pulled up into a boxcar by shadowy strangers, his dreams spooling out ahead of him: "'Welcome aboard, sonny,' he heard out of the dark, the angels and their calloused hands already gone, settled back against the walls in this black before him, a black beyond black, the only light here the light in from stars outside, and he nodded, said too loud, 'Thank you for the hand up, gentlemen,' because he knew this was just like a flicker show, just like a flicker, and that he'd better get ready now to act in one every chance he got." Earl is both naïve and utterly self-absorbed, and Lott draws vivid scenes of his life in Los Angeles in the 1930s and '40s, especially his jostlings with the other actors in their boardinghouse, talking about "the parts they had lost, the parts they had deserved, the parts the parts the parts." At the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where everyone looks like someone else ("two rows over Joan Crawford in a swizzle stick sword fight with Jeanette MacDonald"), Earl falls in love with a singer, Saralee Kennedy, whom he eventually marries. In a wickedly drawn set piece, Earl finally gets a walk-on in a Three Stooges picture, a malevolent professional baptism perpetrated by Moe, his eyes "ground down to pinpricks of black so sharp they could draw blood." But "Ancient Highway" falters when 9-year-old Joan, Earl and Saralee's daughter, picks up the narrative. She's stuck in a cramped apartment with her ailing mother and her father, now working as a waiter but still hoping to be spotted by a casting agent as he exhales dragon puffs of cigarette smoke on the corner of Sunset and Alvarado. Joan filters this account of her troubled childhood though descriptions of the movies she sees each week at Grauman's Chinese Theater. "Song of the South" is "the most perfect movie there has ever been," but it also introduces her to a most frightening word - "divorce." As Joan witnesses harrowing arguments between her parents, Lott works and reworks this theme, denying both his character and his readers much breathing room: "She tries to sing the words she knows she knows, but the shadows are coming up, they are coming, and she has no words from the best movie she has ever seen, she has nothing, that emptiness a piercing, a sword, and she can feel tears still coming, and coming, and she walks faster and faster, trying to make it to somewhere else before all these shadows carry her away, because even though she is invisible, the shadows will still swallow her, they will take her, and it will never matter what side of the street she stays on, because the shadows will have taken her away." IT'S through Brad that we finally see the elderly Earl and Saralee. By now, it's 1980, and he's camped out in their home in the San Fernando Valley after a six-year stint in the Navy. Earl has been reduced to sewing caftans to sell at flea markets, and Saralee, almost blind, spends her days doggedly playing solitaire. They're the irascible yet accommodating old couple you see at the early-bird special, with a history you'd never imagine. And with Earl dropping names in every anecdote, even Brad isn't sure what's the truth. His tender and wry observations about his grandparents add welcome nuance to these chapters, as does his longing for a happy and intact family. When Lett's novel "Jewel" was selected for Oprah's Book Club, he explained his literary strategy: "You write because you hope someone's heart is going to be moved by that story." I'm guessing he tried to achieve that with the reconciliation that takes place at the end of "Ancient Highway." An exhausting scene at a flea market and the ensuing family reunion might have that effect on some readers. But others might think back to an earlier passage, in which a cavalier Earl tells his daughter why his eyes are dry after they've gone to see "Bambi": "They want you to cry." Lisa Fugard has written frequently for The Times's Travel section and is the author of a novel, "Skinner's Drift."
Library Journal Review
Recent Fulbright scholar and celebrated author Lott (e.g., Jewel) here shows how one man's aspirations to become a famous Hollywood actor reverberate over three generations. In 1927, handsome Earl Holmes runs away from his Texas home at age 14 to Southern California. Some years later, after he has married budding, talented songstress Saralee Kennedy, his schemes to make it in the entertainment industry affect his young daughter, Joan. Years pass again, and Joan's twentysomething son, Brad, fresh off the boat after six years in the navy in Southeast Asia, arrives at Earl and Saralee's Southern California home to try to find direction in his life. As the novel moves among the experiences of these three characters, a story unfolds about how people, when feeling misunderstood and unloved by those they love, sometimes turn away in bitterness, and this causes years of hurt and unforgiveness to fester. Breaking such a stalemate requires courage. Written with a distinctive sense of emotional resonance, this novel reveals complex personal truths that feel authentic. Highly recommended for all library fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/08.]--M. Neville, Trenton P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.