Fourth of July Creek is as whirlwind of characters, all varying degrees of fucked up. It centres around Pete, a social worker, who seems to be trying as much to mend himself as others through his work. He bonds with the children he tries to save from their disastrous families, but perhaps this is because he can't fix his own reality, with a broken marriage and a daughter who won't speak to him, slowly going off the rails under his ex-wife's 'care'. Though through the readers own eyes, it is difficult to empathise with even some of the better characters, these broken and confused people each have their own beauty, and through Pete's eyes, there is hope in everyone. This is one of those books that makes you smile and laugh at the same time, and makes you want to hug it so the characters don't leave you in the end. For fans of AM Homes, Jennifer Egan and Jeffrey Eugenides. A seriously good read.
Check out this review from Jon Page from Pages & Pages in Australia.
Also, here are some snippets from Jeff VanderMeer's Guardian review:
‘What should you give up on and what should you hold on to? What will forever remain damaged and what fades into scar tissue? Smith Henderson’s stunning debut novel, Fourth of July Creek, explores these questions, offered up with a richness of character and language… Heart wrenching…The author achieves an eviscerating catharsis, riffing like a jazz musician…In the end, Fourth of July Creek delivers on promised confrontations and revelations, yet they are not the ones you might expect…Henderson is committed to showing us unhappy and unstable people existing at the edges of any safety net. But they’re also people struggling to find a kind of truth, and they’re portrayed with compassion and humanity, in a voice that crackles and lurches with the intensity of a Tom Waits song. Here, at the beginning of his career, Henderson has come within shouting distance of writing a great American novel.’
