April 30, 2000
The Long Walk Home
In this first novel, a Civil War soldier on his way back to Vermont meets and marries a runaway slave.

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  • First Chapter: 'In the Fall'

    By Jeffrey Lent.
    542 pp. New York:
    Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.

    Of all the potentially spurious phrases regularly found lurking on book jackets, none should be approached with greater wariness than ''This is his first novel.'' These days, many first-timers have spent years honing their skills in writing workshops and small magazines by the time they publish that first big book; they're neophytes in name only, the literary equivalent of 29-year-old rookie baseball players or children played in old comedy shorts by very small adult actors.

    It's understandable, though, why a writer whose closet is stuffed with remaindered copies of a short-story collection would still seek to play literary ingénue -- novelists, like children, are less likely to have their transgressions overlooked the older and more experienced they become; conversely, readers, like parents, love nothing so much as a prodigy. Few writers garner more unfettered good will than the true first novelist, the rare writer whose apprenticeship was spent in an appropriately anonymous garret and not around a seminar table in some genial university town.

    Rarer and even more beloved is the legitimate first novelist who steps squinting into the sunlight bearing a work of true distinction. Celebration commences in earnest when the planets align and that book becomes a best seller. Three years after the publication of ''Cold Mountain,'' for instance, Charles Frazier's ears must still be ringing from the party thrown in his honor; cries of ''Bring me the next Charles Frazier!'' continue to rain down from corner offices all over Manhattan. Publishers and editors combing the countryside in that heretofore vain search aren't likely to be pleased that Jeffrey Lent, the writer who may very well inherit Frazier's critical, if not commercial, mantle has been discovered by the same editor and publishing house that unearthed the original.

    Unlike ''Cold Mountain,'' which landed without warning, ''In the Fall'' isn't going to sneak up on anybody. With a first printing of 100,000 copies, a six-figure paperback sale and Book-of-the-Month Club main-selection status, it has rumbled into position for a full frontal assault. The book's pedigree and commercial muscle are worth considering here because in its early pages ''In the Fall'' -- which features a weary, wounded soldier walking home from the Civil War -- bears a striking resemblance to ''Cold Mountain.'' Lent's stoic soldier, Norman Pelham, has seen enough of war and hopes only to be allowed to spend the rest of his days quietly farming with the woman he loves. The past, however, tracks the lovers down. One of them dies violently. The dust and sorrowful history of North Carolina settle over everything. To be fair, writers, like explorers, often discover the same country more than once, and it's not unusual for a writer to arrive at what he considered a unique destination and discover another writer's flag already planted there. Still, the shadow of ''Cold Mountain'' is a long one, and Norman Pelham travels a considerable distance before leaving it completely behind.

    Outside Richmond, one of the last cannon shots of the war almost takes off Pelham's ear and leaves him unconscious. Separated from his comrades, he ''rolled onto his good side to keep his ear in the air and away from the ground. He slept some like that and waking again saw a girl squatting there beside him, her face serious as death itself and her hands cupping a dipper gourd of water as she asked him, 'Is you dead?' ''

    "In Brattleboro the next morning he signed the muster rolls and was issued a uniform and gun as well as a dozen or more other related items. He lived in a tent with five other men from rare and unknown parts of Vermont and went through a couple of weeks of drills and simple training that struck him as having little to do with anything at all. He learned over time that he was fortunate in having officers who were neither ambitious nor career men, but who had age and experience. In early July, they rode trains south and joined the thronged mass of the Army of the Potomac. Norman now carried only his razor in one pocket and his small Bible in another. He'd saved also his extra socks."

    -- from the first chapter of 'In the Fall'

    This girl, Leah, is a runaway slave who believes herself to be a murderer; she is fleeing certain lynching in North Carolina. She follows Pelham's unit until he is mustered out of the Army, and then together they walk home to his family farm in Vermont. Along the way (in one of the book's few poorly pitched passages) they marry while ''standing naked in the moonlight in the Connecticut River.'' Once in Vermont, the racism the couple encounters from Pelham's neighbors isn't so much overt as it is icily indifferent. Leah, whose father was the man who owned her, has green eyes and skin ''the color and luster of hand-rubbed heartpine.'' Two of their three children are fair enough to pass for white, but only their son, Jamie, turns his back on the farm and past to live as white in a white world. Jamie's son, Foster, doesn't learn about his ancestry until after Jamie's death, when he travels for the first time to the Pelham farm and encounters his Aunt Prudence:

    ''The door opened in and an old Negro, a short stout woman in her 50's, stepped into it. . . . Her face deeply wrinkled, skin the color of cinnamon but heavily splotched with tangerine freckles. Green eyes. A fierce head of hair, once the same color as her freckles but now salted with gray. She peered up at him and said, 'Oh, my.' . . . He'd not seen a Negro but a couple of times and those from a distance. He stepped back off the granite onto the grass. 'Excuse me,' he repeated. 'I made a mistake.' ''

    Foster learns from his aunts what they know of the secrets that haunted Leah. He travels back to North Carolina, where his mother's white half brother completes the disturbing chapters missing from the family history.

    When studying book jackets, one should regard with suspicion -- in addition to the phrase ''This is his first novel'' -- any adjective regarding size. The word ''miniature,'' for instance, often means ''doesn't have much to say,'' while ''sprawling'' is a relatively polite way of saying ''doesn't know when to shut up.'' If ''epic,'' though embattled, is still perhaps the least tainted word used to describe a big book done well, then ''In the Fall'' should be considered epic. At 500-plus pages it goes nowhere fast, but is so stately and considered in its movement that its continued tracking of this peculiarly American family for another generation or two would seem only natural.

    One of the beauties of a big book -- a good one, anyway -- is that it provides space and context for language that might seem inappropriate in a work of smaller scope. In ''In the Fall'' there's room for a laugh to be ''a splendid thing as if she opened her mouth and moonlight billowed soft out of it into the air to drift over him and beyond, on over the water where it fell apart under the cicada drone.'' One might feel embarrassed seeing a character in a lesser book laugh like that. Lent's people, though, even have time to collaborate on revising the narrative, such as this moment when Foster sits in the Pelham graveyard, weighted down by new knowledge: ''An owl moaned mournful up on the ridge. Another sip of whiskey. Shaking his head. The owl not mournful at all, just an owl, the voice of night.''

    Only at the end does one understand exactly how precisely the teeming universe of ''In the Fall'' spins. In each generation lovers dangerously couple, and in September characters migrate toward their fates with the regularity of birds heading south. Evil waits until the victims it has wounded pass by close enough to finish off.

    Reading ''In the Fall,'' one gets the dreamy feeling of traveling through places that are at once brand new yet strangely, even comfortingly, familiar. This journey passes through the violent, miscegenetic South of ''Absalom, Absalom!,'' the cosmetically placid resorts of ''An American Tragedy,'' the tense, teeming cities of ''The Great Gatsby'' and ''Ragtime.'' However -- its early fly-by of ''Cold Mountain'' notwithstanding -- In the Fall'' seems cumulative, not derivative, a necessary piece in a uniquely American mosaic. And, aside from the occasional narrative awkwardness expected in a first novel, it's a majestic, vital book. Now that science has told the secret of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, it also seems curiously appropriate. When, at the eve of the Great Depression, the grandson of an ex-slave lights out for the territories with a patrician white girl who happens to be his distant cousin, ''In the Fall'' seems absolutely true.

    Tony Earley is the author of ''Here We Are in Paradise,'' a collection of stories. His first novel, ''Jim the Boy,'' will be published in June.

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