Scissors, Paper, Rock
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Two generations of a Kentucky family struggle with loss and reunion in a novel by a Lambda Award winner: "Brilliant . . . emotional jolts lurk on every page." —Entertainment Weekly
Despite the emotional distance that has long existed between them, Raphael Hardin has left San Francisco to care for his dying father in his rural Kentucky hometown. Raphael had finally made a life for himself in California, away from the tiny Appalachian town of Strang Knob—but now that life is threatened by an AIDS diagnosis.
As father and son reunite, the story moves to Raphael's siblings, among them an alcoholic brother haunted by guilt and a sister beset by loneliness—as well as Miss Perkins, an unmarried schoolteacher who has known the Hardins for decades—painting a portrait of a family and a community, of blood struggles, broken hearts, and binding loves.
"Powerfully moving." —New York Times Book Review
"A seductive rumination on the ways that memory can torment or soothe, and sometimes do both at the same time." —San Francisco Chronicle
"A wise and compassionate novel." —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson follows Crossing the River with a wise and compassionate novel. Eleven episodes explore the history of the Hardin family of Strang Knob, Ky., a fading community hidden away in the Appalachians. At the thematic center is 36-year-old Raphael, youngest of the seven Hardin children, who, in the first episode, ``High Bridge,'' has come home from San Francisco to visit his dying father Tom and is himself dying of AIDS. This beautifully realized story paints an elegiac but unflinching portrait of a gay son's alienation from his harsh parent, even in the face of death. Other sections weave through time to flesh out complex family and community relationships, at the same time establishing the obsolescence of the Hardins' traditional ways. The philosophical voices of Raphael and Miss Camilla Perkins, a spinster schoolteacher who has spent decades on the periphery of the Hardin clan, shape this collage of family life and loss into an affecting whole, even though other narrators are not as striking. In the lesser pantheon of Hardin storytellers are Joe Ray, Raphael's alcoholic brother who learns to live with guilt after causing the car accident that injures his son; Elizabeth, the sister who fulfills her mother's dreams of moving to California, only to experience loneliness and failure; and Clark, the son meant to continue Tom's legacy in the community, but who dies in Vietnam. Johnson movingly conveys the senselessness of death, the inevitability of loss and the failure of families to shield us from either.
