Darlington's Fall: A Novel in Verse - Hardcover

Leithauser, Brad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411488 ISBN 13: 9780375411489

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2002

Synopsis

A novel written in verse chronicles forty years in the lifeof naturalist Russel Darlington, from a seven-year-old boy chasing frogs in an Indiana swamp in 1895, through college and marriage, to a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman. By the author of A Few Corrections.

About this title

About the Author

Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

He is the author of five previous novels—Equal Distance, Hence, Seaward, The Friends of Freeland, and A Few Corrections; four volumes of poetry—The Odd Last Thing She Did, Mail from Anywhere, Cats of the Temple, and Hundreds of Fireflies; and a book of essays. He is the recipient of many awards for his writing, including a MacArthur Fellowship. An Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, he lives with his wife and their two daughters, Emily and Hilary, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

From the Inside Flap

The hero of this one-of-a-kind novel is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero. We meet him in the year 1895 a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, appealing man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marriage; across the Pacific, where on a tiny, rainy island he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman.

Darlington s Fall is ultimately a love story. It is written in verse that vivid, accessible, and lush imparts an intensity to the story and its luminous gallery of characters: Russel s rich, taciturn, up-right, guilt-driven father; Miss Kraus, his formidable housekeeper; Ernst Schrock, his maddening, gluttonous mentor; and Pauline Beaudette, the beautiful, ill-starred girl who becomes his wife. Leithauser s embracingly compassionate outlook invites us into their world into a past so sharply realized it feels like the present.

In Darlington s Fall, Brad Leithauser offers an ingeniously plotted story and the virtues long associated with his elegant stanzas: wit, music, and a keen eye for the natural world. His independent careers as novelist and poet come together brilliantly here, producing something rare and wonderful in the landscape of contemporary American writing: a book that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375411488
• ISBN 13: 9780375411489
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 311