A Rave for Quinnehtukqut [link]

John Cotter, Open Letters Monthly

Quinnehtukqut
Joshua Harmon
Starcherone Books, 2007

{This month's issue of Open Letters features a lead review of Joshua Harmon's Quinnehtukqut by John Cotter, who calls it "the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years...." Read on.... - ed.}

Vermont shares so smooth a northern border with New York, you could finish their maps with a straight edge and a single stroke. But travel one state over, and you’ll find the Canadian border as complex and cragged as the spider web of wide rivers and narrow lakes that shape it. They are the headwaters of the Connecticut River (“Kwenitekq or Quinatucquet—something like that the native tribesmen called their Great River, speaking so low in their throats”). Here, briefly, was once an independent nation, “The Republic of Indian Stream,” and here is the spiritual home of Joshua Harmon’s haunting novel Quinnehtukqut, the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years.

An unassuming package, Quinnehtukqut’s dull beige cover reproduces a period photograph of a couple of backwoods swells smirking outside a clapboard post office. It looks eerily like a snap from one of those Arcadia collections: Images of [Your Town] drawn from historic post cards and documents. As soon as you open the book and read a few lines, you’ll find Quinnehtukqut to be the opposite of that black and white embalming fluid with which we set our local histories. Here is a whole shelf of books: adventure stories, tearjerker romances, historical curios, post-modern poetry, fairytales. Reading Quinnehtukqut is like dropping a dozen of these books on the sofa next to you (what a friend of mine used to call “full-contact reading”), and skipping from book to book, until it gradually dawns on you that that the same current runs through all of them. The story is the same; only the weather changes.

Harmon is a brave writer, and one of the novel’s great strengths is its daring mix of narrative styles: from a straight third-person which easily shuttles back and forth through time, to haunting impressionistic monologues, to jagged, folkloric nuggets and parallel narratives that creep alongside one another on the page. What’s remarkable about this mixture of methods is how accessible it is. Harmon takes care to provide lots of concrete detail, the “whipchords, puttees, suspenders, crumpled and battered hats” of the old New Hampshire settlers, and the feel of the woods, the “dirt, dirt worn smooth, the twigs ironlike, the spruce bark and frozen pitch.” [continued...]

{for more, click the link above.}

{to purchase Quinnehtukut, click here.}