Forgotten Book Friday – A Sound Like Thunder
Posted on October 2nd, 2009
A Sound Like Thunder
By Sonny Brewer
Ballantine, 288 pages
ISBN 0-345-47633-6
Returning to Fairhope, Alabama, the setting for his praiseworthy The Poet of Tolstoy Park, Sonny Brewer’s commendable new lyrical novel features Rove MacNee, who navigates through memoir and memory, recalling his youth on the eve of World War II.
Passionate about cast-net-fishing, sailing, and books—by Emerson, Twain, and Whitman—sixteen-year-old Rove in late 1941 finds himself overwhelmed by problems. First, Rove is worried about his parents who “were playing out their unhappiness in different ways.” Moreover, Rove can now barely tolerate his father, Captain Dominus MacNee, a whiskey besotted merchant sailor whose “eyes [previously] never misspoke even the farthest corners of his mind.” And Rove’s mother has also changed; now intolerant of her husband and struggling to communicate with her family, Lillian MacNee seems lately to prefer the companionship of a German immigrant, Joseph Unruh.
Meanwhile, as the adult triangle approaches a tragic crisis, Rove becomes involved with Anna Pearl Anderson, “the prettiest girl on the Eastern shore,” the one girl who could quicken his pulse “with the least of her antics and attention.”
Rove soon believes that he must distance himself from the emotional maelstrom of life in not-so-bucolic Fairhope, and he turns to his singularly reliable outlet, the Sea Bird, his twenty-five foot sloop, which offers him the enthralling possibility of a Huck Finn escape to a life of Emersonian self-reliance.
But, as Rove will learn, especially through his new friendship with the sagacious artist Walter Anderson, a sixteen-year-old cannot simply sail away from his problems until he has faced certain startling truths. Self-reliance, in fact, may be more complicated and may require more introspection and maturity than Rove had anticipated.
Like Faulkner’s agonistic families, O’Connor’s anxious adolescents, and Welty’s guileless innocents, Brewer’s characters in the compelling A Sound Like Thunder invite readers to meditate upon the challenges of learning to live and love—those universal “terrors of the heart”—and like Yeats—one of Rove’s father’s favorites—to reflect upon a time wherein “everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
Tags: Agonistic, Dominus, Fairhope Alabama, Foot Sloop, Forgotten Book, German Immigrant, Huck Finn, Macnee, Merchant Sailor, Net Fishing, New Friendship, Novel Features, Prettiest Girl, Sea Bird, Self Reliance, Sonny Brewer, Startling Truths, Walter Anderson, Welty, World War Ii
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