Book: Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz

John Schwartz also wrote Reservation Road which I thought was about Native Americans until I realized I had read this book and not all that long ago. Ah well....

This is a sequel to Reservation Road, written about a dozen years later. In the first book, a man and his young son are driving home when their car hits and kills a small boy. The man, Dwight, drives on, not because he is a bad person, but because he is shocked and disbelieving and panicked and heartbroken. However, after four months, he turns himself in and is sent to prison. His wife divorces him and remarries; he is estranged from his son. He was a lawyer but when he gets out of prison, he moves to California and finds work in a sporting goods store.

Back east, his now-grown son gets into bar fight after a humiliating performance in a college baseball game. For him, for a few hours, it is the end of his life. He is provoked and hits a guy with his baseball bat. The guy walks away but then shows up in a hospital emergency room a few hours later with internal bleeding.

The son, Sam, flees to California and shows up at Dwight's place. What happens to these characters is this story and it is well worth reading.

"I'll say here straight out that I believe there's a legitimate case to be made for softball as the true American pastime. The dowdy, smaller-than-regulation, always a little unkempt plots of dirt and sparse grass tucked away in city parks and derelict sandlot zones all across this land of ours: these are the fields of dreams for your average citizen....My son, quite naturally, doesn't see it this way. When Sunday rolls around and I venture into his cave den--covered in dirty sweats and T-shirts and jeans, the guest bedroom has become a rogue state in the act of seceding from the rest of the house--to wake him at nine, he expresses in foul terms his disinclination to join me..."

"Exhaust fumes the air between them. Her bare arm rests on the sill of the open car window. Staring at her wrist, with its drugstore Timex on a cheap leather strap, he's haunted by the wish to buy her a fine watch one day, something with real diamonds. Sentimental tears instantly threaten--in his heart he knows he'll never buy her that watch--but he fights them off."

Aren't all stories about humans also stories about love?

Dennis Lehane reviews:  "The masterly Northwest Corner is that finest of things--a moral novel about mortal events."

Abraham Verghese says: "I had the sense on every page of a writer whose abilities are at their peak, the parts of this tale interlocking just so, and yet being anything but predictable as Schwartz defines the nature of of atonements, the many shades of love, and the face of redemption."