A first novel by the most significant new American writer to have emerged in years. Aloma is a young woman who has put aside her life - as well as her dreams of becoming a pianist - to move in with her lover, Orren. His family has recently been killed in an accident. Stricken with grief and overwhelmingly burdened by the shape that his life has taken, Orren is desperate to keep the tobacco farm running. There is a drought, and he needs it to rain. As he toils with the land, Aloma finds that Orren has ...
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A first novel by the most significant new American writer to have emerged in years. Aloma is a young woman who has put aside her life - as well as her dreams of becoming a pianist - to move in with her lover, Orren. His family has recently been killed in an accident. Stricken with grief and overwhelmingly burdened by the shape that his life has taken, Orren is desperate to keep the tobacco farm running. There is a drought, and he needs it to rain. As he toils with the land, Aloma finds that Orren has become more remote than she could ever have imagined, and that silence has taken hold of their relationship. When she begins to play the piano for the local church, she meets the local preacher, and feels a dangerous attraction for him. As events unfold over this single summer, C.E. Morgan takes us on a journey which describes the journey of our own lives. This novel is about every single relationship between a man and a woman - past, present and future - and about the distance between the lives we lead and the lives we imagine for ourselves.
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The title of C.E. Morgan's first novel derives from Ecclesiastes 9:5. Morgan quotes the Scriptural text as an epigraph: "There is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone. Moreover,the hearts of all are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion."
The Biblical quotation serves as an apt summation of Morgan's book. The novel, which deals with themes of loneliness, death and suffering, suggests that life is full of woe and leads inevitably to death. But life remains precious in offering hope and possible redemption. The book raises important religious issues. The power of music also plays an important part in the story. The author has studied and felt both music and religion. She is a graduate of Berea University, Kentucky where she studied English and voice, and she holds a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.
The novel is set on a small isolated, and bleak tobacco farm in contemporary rural Kentucky. Three weeks before the novel begins, a young man, Orren Fenton, has lost his family in an automobile accident. He returns to work the family farm together with his lover, Aloma. Aloma was orphaned at the age of three and lived with relatives until sent to a boarding school at the age of 12. At the boarding school she fell in love with and learned to play the piano. She aspires to serious musical study.
Orren and Aloma have difficulties in their relationship. The taciturn Orren works incessantly on the farm struggling to make a living and to pay off debt. Aloma has no experience with farming or, indeed, with homemaking. She becomes bored and restless. More importantly, she misses the piano and her music. Orren and Aloma quarrel repeatedly. At Orren's suggestion, Aloma takes a job playing the piano at a small church in a village, Hansonville, 20 miles up the road. As the story develops, Aloma is tempted to leave Orren and begin a relationship with the preacher, Bell Johnson. Bell, 36, lives with his aged mother and works a farm of his own inherited from his father. He preaches part-time and without pay.
He has never married, and feels this as a loss.
Each of the three major characters is lonely and searches for love. Orren and Aloma are both orphans and have difficulty understanding each other. Orren seeks meaning in his life by working the land that had been owned by his family. Aloma is seeking to pursue her music and to attain a degree of independence. Both Orren and Aloma have sharp, rejecting parts of their characters which threaten to drive them apart.
The book describes well scenes in rural Kentucky, the difficult fields, the backbreaking work of tobacco farming, old, rickety, and unmaintained houses, dirt roads, small stores, and spare, primitive churches. Much of the novel explores the consequences to Orren and Aloma in this community of living together without marriage. But Morgan's book has a much more universal cast in its exploration of the relationship between commitment and independence, sexuality and love, and religion and secular activity. Each of the three primary characters is drawn with care and with particularity. The book is written in an understated, lyrical tone; and the dialogue generally flows into the narrative without being set-off with quotation marks.
While Orren and Aloma are the focus of attention, much of the wisdom of the book is delivered by Bell, the preacher. Bell studied briefly at a university, but he abandoned his studies when he despaired of worldly wisdom. He is shown in this book as a persuasive, eloquent and thoughtful individual, far from a stereotyped fundamentalist. The sermons that he gives frame the book, with their emphasis on human loneliness ("we are all lonesome men", p. 78), on the wisdom of understanding the nature of self and selfishness (p. 79) and on the difficulties of overcoming grief and despair (p. 117). These and other words of Bell give some grounding to his own life situation and choices and to those of Orren and Aloma.
An impressive debut novel, "All the Living" is gritty and pensive and avoids cliche. It makes an excellent choice to read for oneself or in the company of a book group.
Robin Friedman
tucketgirl
Sep 3, 2009
little sliver of heaven of a book
this book is such a wonderfully sweet and quiet book that you find yourself in another world reading it. I enjoyed every second of this novel. It has a soft slow pace that you don't find in a lot of novels lately. A true treasure.
