THIS VALE OF TEARS

In Dean’s generational saga, two Missouri families become locked in a deadly feud.

It’s 1973, and Walker Scofield seems bewildered by the falling fortunes of his once-successful clan. The considerable land they once owned in Missouri is now gone, and his son, Merle, is an alcoholic who shows no signs of changing his ways. Walker can’t help but dolefully ask himself,“How had it all gone wrong?” Then Merle’s son, Troy, murders local Bobby Lee Phelps and burns his house down in retribution for taking up with his flirtatious wife, Alisha. Troy is sent to jail, but when he gets out,Alisha leaves town, terrified that he’ll hunt her down and continue his mission of vengeance. She moves in with John Wrenwood, an insurance salesman; however, she’s eventually disappointed when Troy doesn’t come looking for her, and she even feels a strange desire to return to him. Meanwhile, Raelyn Phelps, Bobby Lee’s teenage niece, runs away from home; she’s tired of feeling taken for granted by her parents, who treat her like a servant and routinely beat her. She doesn’t manage to make it very far from home, though, and ends up living with Troy, whom she fears but also finds ruggedly handsome; she also doesn’t care that he killed Bobby Lee, “since she had never particularly liked her uncle.” Word of their relationship travels quickly, setting the stage for a brutal reprisal from the Phelps family, who believe that Troy still hasn’t atoned for his crimes.

In the best parts of this novel, Dean writes with great restraint and intelligence, effectively depicting the downward spiral of the two families and engagingly showing how their grim destinies are intertwined. They all live amid the ruins of their collective descent, and Fairmont, Missouri, is vividly portrayed as a forlorn site of former promise. Furthermore, the author has a notable talent for creating atmosphere; a kind of sad predestination hangs above the Phelpses and Scofields like a darkened storm cloud, just waiting to finally burst. However, Dean’s prose style swings from poetically poignant to gratuitously overwrought, as when the narration notes that “Time had moved at a hectic pace, passing in a variegated rhythm under the malefic sun, and blurring under a series of red moons stretching over decades as time had plodded inexorably forward in a fog of partial recollections.” Another passage uses the term “Beowulfian” as an adjective, which is as pretentious as it is unclear. In addition, the book seems overpopulated with characters and subplots that are likely to ultimately overwhelm the reader. In short, the work sometimes feels as if it’s straining too much for literary heights. That said, the plot at the center of the novel, focusing on the decline and mutual acrimony of the two clans, is elegiacally sad, and many readers will find this to be a darkly enchanting novel—one that transports them to a world filled with despair but not quite empty of hope.

An often moving novel hampered by a tendency toward overwriting.