Warp & Weft
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Set in the gloomy depths of the granite-block textile mills of the industrial Northeast, Warp & Weft illuminates the lives of three generations of men who toil together. Carey, the leader of the small crew who load and unload the endless procession of trucks at the Chace Mill, worries about his wife’s illness and tries to distract himself by pouring all his hopes into the fortunes of the mill’s ragtag softball team; his wife, Joyce, finds herself facing the void more and more on her own. Dominic, the new hire who quit high school and arrived at the mill on his sixteenth birthday, tries to free himself from the inexplicable disapproval of his father, who was paralyzed years before when he, too, worked in the mills, and who has extolled his life of honest work he lost. Bento, who immigrated mid-life, worries about the decline of the strength he so proudly possessed, but fends off his wife’s pleadings to move back to the old country before they die—she has become determined to not be buried in a place that never stopped being foreign from her beloved islands. As the summer of 1978 wears on, each man finds himself in more untenable struggle with gathering events, and with each other. Each will see his life changed, the interlocked threads of life’s fabric in a world of unrelenting work and scarce circumstance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three men slog through days in a New England textile mill and while away the nights in a working-class town in Delaney's quietly lyrical first novel (after 1999's The Drowning and Other Stories). Just 16, Dominic drops out of school to work at Chace Finishing, where Machado, who immigrated from the Azores islands in his middle age, and Carey, a lifer, also toil. It's 1978, and the mill isn't what it used to be; even in boom times the work was long and hard. In short chapters from alternating points of view, Delaney reveals Dominic's desire to prove himself to his bitter, wheelchair-bound father; Machado's resistance to his wife's wish to return to their former home; and Carey's hopes of becoming foreman and his obsession with the mill's softball team. The older workers' life frustrations are deflected onto rookies like Dominic and Parry, a local rich man's son; even as the boys adjust to the work (or, as in Parry's case, eventually quit), life itself pushes them, and the rest of the book's characters, to their limits. Delaney portrays the landscape and the milieu with impressionistic grace, but when it comes to plot, too often primitive tests of manhood (fighting, lifting 55-gallon drums of dye and scoring at ball games) substitute for more profound challenges. Yet Delaney's evocation of the quotidian is affecting, and his empathy is evident on every page of this somber and graceful book.
