Sundown, Yellow Moon
A Novel
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
On an icy day in January 1961, in Bismarck, North Dakota, a sixteen-year-old boy walks home from high school with his best friend, Gene. The sudden sound of sirens startles and excites them, but they don’t have long to wonder what the sound could mean. Soon after seeing police cars parked on their street, the boys learn the shocking truth: hours before, Gene’s father, Raymond Stoddard, walked calmly and purposefully into the state capitol and shot to death a charismatic state senator. Raymond then drove home and hanged himself in his garage.
The horrific murder and suicide leave the community reeling. Speculation about Raymond’s motives run rampant. Political scandal, workplace corruption, financial ruin, adultery, and jealousy are all cited as possible catalysts. But in the end, the truth behind the day’s events died with those two men. And for Gene and his friend, the tragedy is a turning point, both in their lives and in their friendship.
Nearly forty years later, Gene’s friend, a writer, revisits the tragedy and tries to unravel the mystery behind one man’s inexplicable actions. Through his own recollections and his fiction–sometimes impossible to separate–he attempts to make sense of a senseless act and, in the process, to examine his youth, his friendship with Gene, and the love they both had for a beautiful girl named Marie.
Spare, haunting, lyrical, Sundown, Yellow Moon is a piercing study of love and betrayal, grief and desire, youth and remembrance. Using a brilliant, evocative fiction-within-fiction structure, Larry Watson not only brings to life a distinct period in history but, most affectingly, reveals the interplay of memory, secrets, and the passage of time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unnamed, not-entirely-reliable narrator of this novel of obsession from Watson (In a Dark Time) aims his imaginative faculties at discovering, through fiction, the truth of an incident from his adolescence in Bismarck, N.Dak. In trying to figure out why, in 1961, his best friend's father shot a state senator and then hanged himself, the writer tries out a number of different scenarios via short fictions and simple speculation, including mental illness, romantic rivalry, a festering real estate swindle and a looming corruption scandal. The fictions-within-a-fiction are a clever conceit, but ponderous discussion of the pieces weakens it. More problematic is that the specifics of the larger tale aren't engineered to go as far as Watson wants to take them. The book's greatest strength, alongside its palpable sense of place, is its rich period detail including the inescapability of cigarette smoking, in which nearly every character hungrily indulges. But even the narrator's own mother, initially absorbed by the case, loses interest in it rather swiftly, so it should be no surprise that the relentless analysis of minutiae comes to feel like harping.
