With the quiet precision of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and the technical clarity of Mary Roach’s Stiff, this is a novel about a young woman who comes most alive while working in her father’s mortuary in a small, forgotten Western town.“The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . ”Mary Crampton has spent all of her thirty years in Petroleum, a small Western town … years in Petroleum, a small Western town once supported by a powerful grain company. Living at home, she works as the embalmer in her father’s mortuary: an unlikely job that has long marked her as an outsider. Yet, to Mary there is a satisfying art to positioning and styling each body to capture the essence of a subject’s life.
Though some townsfolk pretend that the community is thriving, the truth is that Petroleum is crumbling away—a process that began twenty years ago when an accident in the grain elevator killed a beloved high school athlete. The mill closed for good, the train no longer stopped in town, and Robert Golden, the victim’s younger brother, was widely blamed for the tragedy and shipped off to live elsewhere. Now, out of the blue, Robert has returned to care for his terminally ill mother. After Mary—reserved, introspective, and deeply lonely—strikes up an unlikely friendship with him, shocking the locals, she finally begins to consider what might happen if she dared to leave Petroleum.
Set in America’s heartland, The Flicker of Old Dreams explores themes of resilience, redemption, and loyalty in prose as lyrical as it is powerful.
more
Great read, informative and thoughtful.
A Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson.
While I want to mainly review small press to support writers who don’t have the powerhouses behind them, I just have to pause and say something about this book that came out in 2018. I’d read Susan Henderson’s first book and loved it–Up from the Blue–and planned to read this one, too, but I’d put it on Kindle. And that’s the problem with kindles—as you buy, you push books back and before you know it, you forget what you’ve bought. But I think we all need to read about rural America. We need to understand these dying towns. So, here’s my quick review.
This story is about a young woman who yearns to leave a dying town and find her dreams. What sparks her final decision is a relationship with a complicated man who left town at the age of fourteen. He’s riddled with guilt and confusion resulting from a tragic mistake that killed his brother and led to the closing of a business that had kept the dying town limping along. The boy’s character was so tarnished, he was forced to escape and find a home elsewhere. While judgement usually languishes with intimacy and relationship building, the boy’s disappearance instead contributes to imagined actions, imagined darkness, all exacerbating anger and resentment. Memory is altered; character is permanently stained.
When the man returns to town to sit with his dying mother and manage her funeral, the daughter (the narrator of the book) of a funeral director and town embalmer, becomes intrigued. She, too, is an outsider, but one without his scars and drama. She now is the only friend this man has during his grief.
But the story is about so much more than a development of a complex relationship. It’s also more than a story about a lonely young woman who yearns to escape a suffocating town and open up her eyes and life.
Susan Henderson has succeeded in developing one of the most unique characters I have ever read—death– and in her development of death, she teaches us about intimacy and yearning for life. She writes beautifully about types of death. Death of a town when industry leaves. Death of a childhood when a tragedy kills innocence. Death of our soul, our humanity, when we suffer and blame. But it is the death of the human body where she really excels. It is here, with this amazing metaphor development, the book is lifted to a different level, from a good, entertaining story to extraordinary, insightful poetry.
“This past year, I embalmed Jenny Johnson, one of my high school classmates, and we never got along so well as the day I fixed her hair with rollers and painted her nails crimson, like he school’s colors.”
“Intimacy for this lonely person is achieved in her care and compassion for the body devoid of life. Details of attempts to restore life to the dead body are simply amazing. And throughout the entire novel, every inch of it, the writing is filled with smart observations that bring us closer to loneliness—which of course is a part of all death.”
“Sometimes I feel like we get along best when I tell only pieces of the truth.'”
“All my life, I have learned the lesson that closeness is tangled up with rejection and shame.”
…”‘Sometimes that’s a lonely place to be, and yet, you don’t really want to be on the inside, either, where you feel pressure to be someone you’re not.'”
And on and on. I could quote and quote this book. It is filled with treasures. I am so sorry I got around to it this late, but maybe there are people out there who have not found it yet.
As I said, I loved Up from the Blue too. This is a different book, but it has the familiar, strong writing voice– centered in details, filled with compassion and intimacy, always displaying competent understanding of the importance of place, and of course anchored in poetry of written word. That’s Susan Henderson.
The economic underpinning of a small town collapses and the slow death of a community ensues. A common story, but told here with an uncommon voice, full with genuine empathy but unsparing in its portrayal of the extent to which that community’s demise unwittingly comes by its own hand, by its inability—or is it unwillingness?—to move past grief and by the unfounded assumptions that place blame wrongly and that brings out the worst in them. It is a story of the consequences of emotional inertia, individual and collective. Told through the eyes of Mary, young mortician at the local funeral home who came into the job because her father owns the business, we see the unraveling of a town provide the emancipation of an individual never fully accepted by her community. A mesmerizing, timeless counterpoint, beautifully told.
Enjoyable.
One of the best novels I have read in recent times. I had to write down a few of Henderson’s superb quotes because I thought she had been reading my mail. Excellent imagery, wonderful characters, stunning descriptions of a small dying town in Montana that refuses to identify their disease. Just remarkable. Kudos to Susan Henderson!
Such a great read and extremely insightful. The issues are small town, but the emotions and personalities are universal.
The writing is superb and the story and characters are original and compelling. I enjoyed this book so much I sent a copy to others to read.
This was a wonderful book, original in theme, with a superb sense of place. I found it completely believable. It was sad without being maudlin, and the author handled the mechanics of death with tact and realism. As we all know, personal relationships morph in sometimes unexpected ways. She shows (not tells) about these complexities with understated brilliance. I highly recommend it.
A well written book about someone’s slice of life that many people in rural towns in America could relate to.
Set in an area of Montana where I grew up which was interesting.
Small town drama complete with bullies and hypocrites. Kind of sad.
Easy to read and hard to forget. It tugs at inner feelings and secrets everyone carries in their heart, wishes and hopes that once lost are hard to recover. I would recommend this read to just about everyone.
I thought it was a wonderful job of writing. A well done book is like a gem to find. Small town living and dying.
I’m in the precess of reading this book but so far I am enjoying the story and how well written this book is. I can really see the landscape and the small dying town
as her writing is so descriptive.
I liked reading this book. Interesting to learn more about the practices at a funeral home. Great title. Satisfying ending.
I enjoyed this book.
I can NOT say how wonderful this book was! Not to be missed and will haunt me for a very long time.
This book is filled with flawed but realistic characters battling a tough life style, where sympathy and reason are outside of the necessary mindset for survival. The past is ever-present and roles are set in stone. It is a book about courage and finding your place in life against great odds.
After an accident at the grain elevator, the people of Petroleum struggle to make ends meet in this small dying town. The Flicker of Old Dreams is a beautifully written tale of a hard scrabble way of life, of hope and dying dreams.
This is a beautifully-written novel about a young woman in a dying midwestern town and the homecoming of a young man who played a part in a long-ago fatal accident. Henderson is a master of tone and capturing the details that nail a character and a moment in time. Intriguing story, mystery, and lovely sentences make a perfect beach read! Highly recommend.