Thursday, July 24, 2008

• The Cherry Pit

  Currently Reading The Cherry Pit By Donald Harington see related

  by: Donald Harington
  review by: aka_gomer

  This is one of Harington's earliest novels, which I believe was written in and is set in the fifties. It is about a small man named Clifford who lives a dull and humdrum life in the north with his indifferent and passively aggressive wife. Though they have only been married for a few years, their marriage is awful. A recent surprising event causes Clifford to return to his hometown, Little Rock, AR, in order to try and discover who he is and what he wants from life. Once Clifford returns home, everything that he had expected turns out to be not at all what he expects.
  
  The story twists and turns from place to place and character to character, so it keeps you reading, but it doesn't have a strong plot. Every character in the book seems to develop strongly and grow except for our main character, Clifford, which left me really frustrated once I finished the book. Everyone but Clifford seems to come out of the novel as having learned something and as having a better life ahead of them; Clifford does not.
  
  The Cherry Pit is an excellent book for capturing what it feels like to be twenty-something years old and having no clue what you're doing with your life; at first I loved it for that. As the book continued, though, I found myself wondering where in the world Harington was going with it. As Harington himself told me, it is one of his first novels, and he feels that it strives for too much--too much feeling and emotion trying to be carried out in one book, which left me with an over-the-top sort of feeling.
  
  Harington also told me that The Cherry Pit is a book about virginity. Indeed, the book feels very young and very, very new. Though it has strong aspects of sexuality, I feel that virginity in The Cherry Pit goes a lot further than that. It accounts for the twenty-something year old feelings, nostalgia, and yearnings for adventure and new things as well as for its shaky start as one of Harington's first novels.
  
  I know that Harington is a very celebrated Southern writer who is now in his seventies. He wrote The Cherry Pit when he was in his twenties. It is the only book of his that I have ever read. I don't judge my anticipation of his other books by it because it's such a young novel and because, overall, I was pretty disappointed with it for its immaturity. If anything, The Cherry Pit is great to read simply to see what it was that Little Rock used to be.

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