Bruce Machart

When was the last time you read a book that was beautifully written AND was a compelling story? Bruce Machart has done just this in The Wake of Forgiveness, his first novel. His writing is both lyrical and poetic but maintains the dramatic tension and suspense to move the story forward.
Set against the hard-baked Texas countryside from 1895 to 1924 this story follows the fate of a family after the mother of three boys dies while giving birth to her fourth son, Karel. Her husband never forgives Karel for her death and makes all of his sons the object of his misery, literally harnessing them together to plow his fields. Karel is raised with no love or physical affection from his father, who has never touched him in any way but in anger, and he continually tries to fill that void with imaginings of the mother he never knew.
Machart’s descriptions of the landscape and of the physically and emotionally damaged characters, who strive to survive in it, are evocative and moving. You can smell the sweat of a hard day’s work, the taste of blood from a split mouth, feel the deep yearning of a young boy for a mother he never knew, and even feel the despair and misery of a man who has lost the only thing in life that mattered to him.
This isn’t just a family melodrama though and Machart explores large looming themes of loss, loyalty, forgiveness and redemption.
This is literary fiction at its best not canned writers’ workshop fodder.
… (mehr)

Hot damn, this is some good writin’! I read Machart’s first book, “The Wake of Forgiveness,” and loved it, and this one is just as well written and thoughtful as his first, albeit a lot more brutal.

These are a collection of short stories about hard working, hard living men, and how they deal with love, life and mostly loss. Their losses cover girlfriends, wives, children, and physical health. Machart gets into the interior lives and feelings of these men, whom for the most part, are overlooked in literature and even in our daily lives. It is easy to think of them as stoic Marlborough men, but Machart shows us these men do have emotions and they struggle to make sense of their world just like we all do.

This book is not for the faint of heart. I think there is some sort of death in each of the stories, some more graphic than others, and if your sensibilities can’t handle the death of domesticated pets (dogs), this really isn’t the book for you. One of the hardest stories for me to read was the one involving a nurse’s aide who worked in the burn unit, I had to put that story down a couple of times and then go back to it.

Machart’s prose is spare, but powerful. His writing style and subject matter, “muscular males” reminds me of another one of my favorite authors, Robert Olmstead. If you like Olmstead you’ll surely like Machart.
… (mehr)