By Nancy Price Graff

Anyone who has lived in a small town knows it is no Eden. In microcosm small towns harbor every emotion known to man: love, anger, bitterness, happiness, lust, sorrow, joy, hope, and the list goes on. They are places where the community is often unusually and uniquely close, but underneath that patina run currents of tension that hum like high voltage electric lines. It doesn’t take much to upset this delicate balance. In the original Eden, two people, one snake and one apple bollixed up paradise forever.

Charles Bender Sr. manages such an undoing single-handedly. In Thomas Christopher Greene’s second novel, “I’ll Never Be Long Gone,” Bender goes out into the woods in the fictional town of Eden, Vt., and blows the back of his head off with his rifle. Dying of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, he decides not to endure the agony of the final months left to him. His two sons, Charlie and Owen, feel betrayed by their father’s suicide, but that shock soon pales when they learn that the family patriarch has left them a legacy as harsh as their upbringing. To Charlie, Bender bequeaths his restaurant, a remodeled schoolhouse that he has built through decades of grueling work into a gourmet delight that draws high praise from distant urban reviewers, as well as the family homestead. To Owen, his father bequeaths $10,000 with instructions that his son should use the money to follow his own path. The boys reel under the inequities, assumptions and responsibilities implied by their father’s choices, but neither seriously considers crossing him, even in death.

Charlie, 18 at the time he inherits the restaurant, has always been the slower, steadier one. Owen, a year younger, is better looking, more charismatic and less grounded. Both boys grew up in the kitchen of Charlotte’s, their father’s restaurant, where there he regularly presented them with bowls of raw ingredients and then watched them compete against each other to improvise recipes. At the end of the day, the winner’s dish became a featured addition to the restaurant’s menu. Charlie was a natural, blessed with talent that even exceeded his father’s. Owen’s interests were elsewhere, including, as the boys hit their late teens, in a beautiful and smart classmate named, appropriately, Claire Apple.

After their father’s death, Owen takes his cash and his resentment and disappears for almost two decades, traveling the world as a competent albeit uninspired ship’s cook. Charlie, although overwhelmed at first by the work of the restaurant, shoulders the burden of his inheritance with the steadiness of a musk ox and builds Charlotte’s into a restaurant of regional renown. Claire graduates from high school, attends college, studies in France, where she falls in love with cooking, and returns to her parents’ home in Eden after a love affair sours. Eventually, she finds work at Charlotte’s. Charlie falls in love with her, they marry, have a baby, Jonah, and build a life that ultimately shows all its vulnerabilities and suppressed frustrations when Owen returns after 17 years.

The plot of “I’ll Never Be Long Gone” holds few surprises, but other elements of the book are remarkable and noteworthy. One such delight is the superb evocation of place. Although Greene has lived in Vermont for only 12 years, his description of the landscape and natural world in all their seasons and semi-wildness will resonate in anyone who holds the state dear. The view as described from the back of the restaurant of the changing moods of the Dog River is a constantly evolving parade of Vermont’s breathtaking seasons. But for Greene, all this is foundation. “I think the way place informs character is critical,” he said in an interview. However, so strong is the description, so lyrical the writing that the landscape itself takes on the strength and power of a character.

Greene also excels at food writing. As Charlie, and later Charlie and Claire, sweat in the restaurant’s kitchen, building Charlotte’s reputation for serving outstanding food, they raise Charlie’s father’s credo of using simple, fresh food to art. In many places — “marinating strips of lamb in Moroccan spices, cinnamon blending with the gaminess of the meat to become almost indiscernible, a low note of sweet smokiness that lifted the entire dish” — the writing is so precise and, frankly, tantalizing that it belies Greene’s modest disclaimer that he’s simply an avid amateur cook. This is the writing of someone whose touch in the kitchen is as deft as his touch on the page.

A lapsed Catholic, Greene claims that he nevertheless remains drawn to the biblical stories that interested him when he was a child. “Biblical stories are archetypical stories,” he says. “They are a way to build truth into a story.” To that end, he has saturated the book with biblical references. Some of them achieve their end of adding richness and depth to the story; a few seem gratuitous. Nevertheless, the overall effect is successful. Greene has created a story that proves once again the adage that there are really only two themes: love and death.

“I’ll Never Be Long Gone” would be a good choice for book groups because it raises provocative questions. What should we think of Charlotte, Charlie and Owen’s beautiful, distant mother, who, knowing her husband has killed himself, sends their two frightened teenage sons out into the woods to find their father’s body and carry it home on their shoulders? Charles Bender Sr. is unquestionably a harsh father, but he has perfectly read his sons’ temperaments and divides his estate accordingly. Is it cruel to bestow such unequal inheritances if each child receives what he needs? Claire deceives, cheats, abandons her son during a family crisis and blames her husband for her own weaknesses, but does she deserve our sympathy, too? Owen isn’t a complex character, but Charlie is, and commands attention.

In England “I’ll Never Be Long Gone” has been a runaway success. Published there under the title “After the Rain,” a title as enigmatic as the one the book’s cover wears in the United States, this book captures, as Walter Hard once wrote, “hard living in a hard place.” Greene’s superb setting of the book, alone, should earn it a place in the state’s literature alongside the works of Howard Frank Mosher and David Budbill. And if the characters and plot sometimes disappoint, the book in its totality surmounts the shortcomings and delivers a thoughtful examination of dreams won and lost and perhaps won again.


Nancy Price Graff is a Montpelier writer and editor.