The Wake of Forgiveness
Bruce Machart, 2010
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547521947
Summary
Bruce Machart tells an epic story of a Texas family at the turn of the twentieth century: a family of men led by a father, emotionally crippled following the death of his wife while in childbirth with their fourth boy, Karel.
From an early age, Karel proves so talented on horseback that his father enlists him to ride in acreage-staked horseraces against his neighbors, culminating in the ultimate high-stakes race against a powerful Spanish patriarch and his alluring daughters. Hanging in the balance are his father’s fortune, his brothers’ futures, and his own fate. Fourteen years later, with the stake of the race still driven hard between him and his brothers, Karel is finally forced to dress the wounds of his past and salvage the tattered fabric of his family.
With rich descriptive language and a cadence as deliberate and determined as the people and horses of the story, The Wake of Forgiveness compels us to consider the inescapable connections between sons and their mothers, between landscape and family, and between remembrance and redemption. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—near Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Ohio State University
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas
Bruce Machart is the author of the novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in October of 2010, and a forthcoming collection of short stories entitled Men in the Making, due out from HMH in 2011.
His fiction has been published in some of the country's finest literary magazines, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Story, One Story, Five Points, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. His short stories have been anthologized in Best Stories of the American West and Descant: Fifty Years. The winner of numerous awards and fellowships, Bruce is a graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University.
A native Texan, Bruce was born and raised in the Houston area. His father grew up on a cash-crop farm in rural south Texas not far from the Lavaca County landscape of The Wake of Forgiveness, and Bruce's mother was born in the deep south (and named her son after her favorite little town: Bruce, Mississippi). After high school, Bruce worked his way through eight years of undergraduate study before leaving for the midwest and graduate work in Columbus, Ohio. He later spent three years in the Boston area, where he taught literature and writing at Berklee College of Music, Boston University, and Grub Street Writers. In 2003, he returned to Houston, where he joined the faculty of Lone Star College. He is at work on a second novel. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A mesmerizing, mythic saga of four motherless brothers at war with one another and with their stern father.... Above all, as its title promises, it's a story about forgiveness and a hard-won redemption.... [Machart] has a good ear for Western speech, and he writes as convincingly about an era he never experienced as he does about such diverse topics as cotton farming, quail hunting and gelding stallions. The echoes of McCarthy are loud in his lush style, but there are also undertones of Faulkner, Larry McMurtry, Norman Maclean and Charles Frazier. Machart blends these influences into a style uniquely his. The Wake of Forgiveness is a fine debut.
Philip Caputo - New York Times
The Wake of Forgiveness, which hails from the Robert Olmstead school of western, is a dark tale about fathers and sons, missing mothers and the poison that lies at the heart of the question, "Who's to blame?"
Yvonne Zipp - Washington Post
Machart's bleak, accomplished debut opens in 1895 as a landowning Texas family faces both sides of life's spectrum: the birth of a fourth son and the death of the boy's mother during childbirth. This event resonates throughout the lives of Vaclav Skala, who lost "the only woman he'd ever been fond of," and his four sons who, 15 years later, find their youngest sibling, Karel, to be a preternaturally talented equestrian. While Vaclav's wagers on his son's races increase, so does Karel's confidence, especially when facing off against the talk of the town: Guillermo Villaseñor, a powerful, moneyed, patronizing patriarch with three beautiful daughters. Yet Karel remains haunted by the memory of his mother, often feeling "the flat cool of her absence," and a prideful father who keeps him at arm's length. The consequences of a race that has his father's land hanging in the balance play out some 14 years later when, in 1924, Karel is married with children, yet still finds himself straying and facing inter-familial discord. Machart's moving story unfolds lyrically and sensually, with little fanfare, as his thoughtful prose propels a character-driven story about family, morality, and redemption.
Publishers Weekly
A wager destroys a farm family in this risk-taking first novel about Czech immigrant landowners in early 20th-century South Texas. Hard men are grabbing land any way they can. Vaclav Skala has been softened by a loving wife, who has borne him three sons, but when she dies giving birth to a fourth (Karel), he reverts to his old self, the hardest of taskmasters. He has his boys, not horses, plow the fields; they will be marked for life by misshapen necks. In 1910, their lives are upended by the arrival of Villaseñor, a hugely rich Mexican looking for land and husbands for his three comely daughters. He proposes a horserace to Vaclav; if he wins, he'll marry off his girls. Vaclav, confident in his racehorse and Karel's riding skills, agrees. The race is a fine set piece. Villaseñor, the superior strategist, has already won over the older boys, who will ignore some dirty tricks. Karel loses to Graciela, the Mexican's youngest. There are recriminations. After a vicious fight, Vaclav banishes his three oldest, who marry the next day. What next? A violent blood feud? Not at all. Machart is after more than stirring melodrama. The cadences of his formal prose, punctuated occasionally by earthy dialogue, tell you that, just as his shuttling between 1910 and 1924 minimizes suspense. He is making a resonant statement about the deformities of a world in which men make the rules, and mothers are dead or powerless. This involves the introduction, in 1924, of benighted twins, teenage brothers, firebugs who have avenged their dead mother by burning to death the father who brutalized her. There is much more, including bootlegging rivalries and a second deadly fire, but the trouble is, Machart fails to integrate plot and theme, and the novel splinters into a variety of episodes, all of them rendered with flair. Though he navigates erratically within it, Machart has created a dense, vibrant world, achievement enough for his debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The book opens with Karel’s birth, which is also the occasion of his mother’s death. How does this change the family dynamic? How does it introduce the themes of guilt and shame and how do you see these themes continue throughout the book?
2. In the book’s opening pages, we see Sr. Villasenor establish himself at the local bank. When he is condescended to by the banker, how does he get his revenge? How are Villasenor and Skala different sorts of men? How are they the same?
3. Discuss Karel’s relationship with his father. Vaclav never holds his infant son; later, the narrator says, “Karel wanted his pop’s strap, the stinging and unambiguous urgency of its attention, and, for Karel, the closest he got to his father’s touch” (p. 20). Where else do you see the correlation of violence with affection? How else does this correlation play out in Karel’s life?
4. On pages 30–31, Karel recounts a nightmare in which his father is kicked by a horse, then a horseshoe is nailed to his hand. What does this image of crucifixion signify in the story? Vaclav is far from Christ-like, but what sacrifice happens in the book? What redemption?
5. Karel is haunted by the absence of his mother. How does he seek maternal love? How does he confuse maternal love with something else?
6. On page 43, Karel kicks a pregnant cow. Why does he do this? How do we know this act is premeditated? What sorts of connections might Karel have between violence and money, or value? Where would those have come from?
7. The structure of the book is not strictly chronological. Why do you think the author chose to structure the book this way? How do the characters unfold through this broken narrative? What is gained by seeing Karel and the other characters at different points in their lives?
8. Does Karel feel bonded with the Knedlik boys because of the way their fathers died? Was that a reliable trust? When you finally read the scene of Vaclav’s death, is it what you expected? Does this change how you feel about Karel?
9. Discuss the pivotal horserace between Karel and Graciela. What made this race different than any other race? How is this race different than the one Karel ran against the Dalton boy earlier in the book? What are we to understand about Karel’s sportsmanship?
10. After the race, during the fight that ensues between the Skala men, what does the author mean when he says the fight was “flawless in its wickedness”? Why does it feel like this fight was fated? What was gained, and what lost, in the fight?
11. There are a few short passages in the book told from the point of view of Father Carew. Why do you think the author chose to switch the narration for these few moments? What do we gain from his perspective?
12. Raymond Knedlik says to Karel, “‘You ain’t got any brothers, Skala, unless you’re talking about me and Joe here. Them others won’t claim you.’” (page 293). What does Karel think of this claim? What does being a brother mean to Karel? What do you think makes men into brothers?
13. The title of the book is “The Wake of Forgiveness.” Who is forgiven? Why? What comes in the “wake of forgiveness”?
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