Firmly rooted in remote northwest Montana during the Reagan administration, Smith Henderson's robust first novel centers on Pete Snow, a dedicated Department of Family Services officer and his caseload of broken families and displaced children. Among the "twitchy and dysarthric" kids, "newly suicided fathers" and mothers with "shifting partners and adversaries and errant unattached freaks" stands Jeremiah Pearl, a survivalist and paranoid fanatic. Although Jeremiah and his family have taken to the land and holed up in scattered wilderness camps with their guns and Bibles, his 11-year-old son, Ben, is referred to Pete when he wanders down from the mountains and is discovered sick and lost on the local school playground.
With an epic sweep, Fourth of July Creek is the story of Pete's dogged attempts to "save" Ben, and Jeremiah's equally stubborn refusal to surrender his family to a society of "poisons and toxicants... entrapment, fiat currency, lawyers." It is also the story of Pete's scattered but sincere attempts to save himself from his own broken marriage and deal with his runaway teenage daughter, his alcoholism, his unpredictable brother wanted for assaulting his parole officer. As Jeremiah's paranoia increases and Pete's personal life unravels, violence escalates and Henderson's tale branches into a full-blown saga of modern American disconnection and extremism.
A 2011 Pushcart Prize winner and Pen Emerging Writers Award nominee, Henderson homes in on the U.S.'s dark side. This modern America might not be the country we want to see, he convincingly shows us it's what we have: a hard place that only kindness and empathy can make easier. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.