Gifted
John Daniel, 2017
Counterpoint Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781619029200
Summary
Henry Fielder, solitary and unmoored in his thirties, runs into an old lover and finds himself ready to tell the story he has harbored for two decades.
He is fifteen, in rural western Oregon, enduring a year of sorrows. His mother has died, his father is physically abusive, and his extraordinary spiritual affinity for the wild lives of his native country seems to desert him. An older couple, retiring to the area from California, offer solace and expanded cultural horizons but set him further at odds with his millworker father.
The abuse escalates, and ultimately a natural disaster catalyzes a crisis in which father and son betray each othe. Henry sets out on a trek through the backcountry of the Oregon Coast Range, seeking to understand what has happened and to forge a new sense of self.
A Huck Finn of the modern age, Henry is portrayed with a directness and clarity that pulls readers through the environmental dynamics of the Pacific Northwest.
In stark yet beautiful prose that highlights his long tenure as a nature writer, Daniel creates an odyssey that explores the spiritual dimensions and deeply entangled pains and pleasures of belonging to the human domain and the natural world of which it is part.
Set in the mid-1990s, when environmentalists and timber communities warred over the future of the last Northwestern old-growth forests, Gifted is the story of a young man with a metaphysical imagination—naïve yet wise, gifted yet ordinary—who comes of age under harsh circumstances, negotiating the wildness of his home country, of his human relationships, and of the emerging complexities of his own being. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—State of South Carolina, USA
• Raised—near Washington, D.C.
• Education—Reed College (no degree); M.A., Stanford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives near Eugen, Oregon
John Daniel is an American poet, essayist, memoirist, novelist and teacher. In all, he has written some 10 books, most recently his 2017 debut novel, Gifted.
Daniel was born in South Carolina, raised outside of Washington, D.C., and in 1966 attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He dropped out of Reed but stayed in the West. spending the next 24 years as a logger, railroad inspector, and climbing instructor, among other jobs.
During all that time, Daniel was writing poetry, and in 1982 he won the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. He remained at Stanford to earn his M.A. and for the next five years taught Poetry and freshman English.
He now earns a living writing, as well as teaching—in workshops and writer-in-residence programs around the country.
Writing
In addition to his novel, Gifted, Daniel has published a book of essays, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature (2009); Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone (2005), part journal and part memoir; Winter Creek: One Writer’s Natural History (2002); and Looking After: A Son’s Memoir (1996), about caring for his dying mother.
He has also published three volumes of poetry — Of Earth: New and Selected Poems (2012), All Things Touched by Wind (1994), and Common Ground (1988).
His work can be found in Audubon, Outside, Southwest Review, Western American Literature, Portland Magazine, Open Spaces, Oregon Humanities, Orion, and in more than 20 textbooks and anthologies.
Recognition
Daniel's poetry has won him a Pushcart Prize, John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, three Oregon Book Awards, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.
In addition to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, he has also been selected for the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a Research and Writing Fellowship from Oregon State University’s Center for the Humanities, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He has served as chair of PEN Northwest, serves as a judge for, or on the boards of, various literary organizations. He lives with his wife in the Coast Range foothills, west of Eugene, Oregon. (Adapted from the author's bio.)
Book Reviews
“Sunrise and sunset are made of the same light, and, like gladness and sadness, you can’t have one without the other.” These words arise in the mind of Henry Fielder at the age of 16. Think he might be an old soul? Yes, oh yes. His beloved mother dies when he is 15. Then later his father kicks the bucket when a tree falls on their house in rural western Oregon. If that plotline sounds like a formulaic YA premise, don’t go there. This novel runs deep. Henry is one of those kids who doesn’t talk much, who walks the woods in wonder. Woodland creatures who usually bolt away from humans instead step closer to Henry and they share spirit. That is his gift and those are the moments Henry lives for. READ MORE …
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers
Daniel explores an ecology of natives and invasives — plant and animal — while rendering clear-cuts and second-growth forests with the same keen eye for beauty as he does towering old growths.… His protagonist spends much of the book avoiding truths small and large…but the novel is most intriguing when Daniel pits dishonesty between his characters, not between writer and reader. In justifying the writing, Daniel undermines the terrifying and humbling aspects of his remarkable story — reasons enough to write it.
Marc Bojanowski - New York Times Book Review
[E]loquent.… [Daniel's] digressions about the landscape mirror Henry’s own attempts to find solace in an unjust, confusing world. Daniel’s impressive novel quietly builds, ending in a place where Henry can see the way…into a much more beautiful, logical future.
Publishers Weekly
Lyrical evocations of nature clash with shocking revelations of human nature in this coming-of-age story set in and around the deep woods of western Oregon in the 1990s.… An insightful though rambling stroll through the wilderness of adolescence and the Oregon woods.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Gifted … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about Henry's Fielder's childhood--his mother's death and his father's abusive behavior. How has so much sorrow and hardship in Henry's young life affected him?
2. In what way does the beauty of the natural world offer solace to the boy? Do you ever—or frequently—turn to nature to find comfort, release, or repose?
3. Talk about this passage: "Sunrise and sunset are made of the same light, and, like gladness and sadness, you can’t have one without the other.” Select other passages you find evocative or poignant or insightful in how they capture Henry's isolation and loneliness.
4. Henry also turns to the stories of native Americans that his mother loved. How do those lift him up? What does he find in them?
5.Consider the the way in which Henry seems haunted by the presence of his parents, first his mother, later his father. Are what he experiences dreams…or visions? In what way do they seem to heal? Is Henry a sort of shamanistic figure (someone who accesses an altered state of reality —a trance, perhaps— in order to interact with the spiritual world)?
6. What about Henry as a student—he's not a particularly "good" one. Yet he loves "biologycosmologyphilosophyreli
7. Talk about the role that Carter and Josie Stephens play in Henry's life. Also discuss the Sweet Grass Confederacy and it's role. How would you describe the commune?
8. Henry admits that he sometimes plays fast and lose with the truth in his retelling. Where is his story unreliable, and why does he admit to deception?
9. How did you experience the violence at the heart of the novel? Too much? Sensational? Or done purely in the service of the story?
10. What is the meaning of the novel's title? What does "gifted" mean in the context of the story?
11. Where you caught off guard by the twist and the end of the novel involving Lynn?
12. Is the ending of the novel hopeful?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, oneline or off, with attribution. Thanks.)