Wandering through ‘Shohola Falls’

A review by HAROLD M. GREEN

In reading Michael Pearson’s new novel, “Shohola Falls,” I am reminded of a quote from Goethe: “Thinking brings forth only thought, / But feeling is with living fraught.”

Indeed, as in his previous non-fiction works, “Imagined Places” (1991) and the autobiographical “Dreaming of Columbus (1999),” Pearson’s feeling for place and for the complexities and nuances of human relationships makes his first novel a sparkling excursion into lived experience.

“Shohola Falls” is a felicitous blend of romantic novel, travelogue, rural sociology, and perhaps most importantly, an exercise in historical reconstruction. It is the story of teenager Tommy Blanks’ quest for identity and meaning in the face of adversity. After the death of his mother and the abrupt departure of his father, Blanks is on his own in the family’s Bronx apartment, living on money left by his father and wages from an after-school job. Perhaps as a result of the trauma of abandonment, Blanks develops a compulsion to steal which he cultivates into an art form, and when caught shoplifting he is remanded to the Washington Lake Boys’ Home in Sullivan County.

Here he becomes enamored of a local girl, Nada. This idyllic state of affairs is temporarily disrupted when Blanks becomes involved in a major brawl at the home, subsequently escapes, and is presumed dead after his cap is found floating in the Delaware River. He is given shelter by a Korean War veteran, Andrew Weiry, a former teacher now living as a hermit in a cabin near Shohola Falls. It is through Weiry that Blanks learns something that will change his life forever: his great great-grandfather, Thomas Blankenship, was the model for Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.”

Here, fantasy and fiction collide with real life, for there was indeed a Thomas Blankenship. In his autobiography, Twain writes, “…Huckleberry Finn was Tom Blankenship exactly as he was…ignorant, unwashed...the only independent person-boy or man in the community….”

Part history and part conjecture, the “Blankenship journals,” liberally interspersed throughout the narrative, bring into bold relief the contrasts and convergences between the turbulent 1960s and the simpler times of Mark Twain.

Appropriately enough, Pearson concludes “Shohola Falls” by alluding to the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, for like Huck Finn, his protagonist Tommy Blanks epitomizes Marcel’s Homo Viator, the itinerant wanderer or wayfarer always passing from one situation to another.

Pearson holds a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University and directs the creative writing program at Old Dominion University. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

He will visit Gallery 97 in Spruce Home and Gift at The Spring House Commons in Barryville, NY to read passages from “Shohola Falls” on Saturday, November 22 at 5:30 p.m.

For more information call 845/557-0097.