Abbeville by Jack Fuller
Fiction Hardcover
ISBN 13: 978-1-932961-47-8
6 x 9 / 272 pages / $24.95
June 2008
Summary | Praise | Note from the Author | Bio | Events
Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets
Summary
Until the dot.com bubble burst, George Bailey never gave much thought to why his grandfather seemed so happy.
But then George’s wealth vanished, rocking his self-confidence, threatening his family’s security and making his adolescent son’s difficult life even more painful. Returning to the little Central Illinois farm town of Abbeville, where his grandfather had prospered and then fallen into ruin, flattened during the Depression, George seeks out the details of this remarkable man’s rise, fall, and spiritual rebirth, hoping he might find a way to recover himself.
Abbeville sweeps through the history of late-19th through early-21st century America—among loggers stripping the North Woods bare, at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, with French soldiers at the Battle of Verdun, into the abyss of the Depression, and finally toward the new millennium’s own nightmares. At the same time it examines life at its most intimate. How can one hold onto meaning amidst the brutally indifferent cycles of war and peace, flood and drought, boom and bust, life and death?
In clean, evocative prose that reveals the complexity of people’s moral and spiritual lives, Fuller tells the simple story of a man riding the crests and chasms of the 20th century, struggling through personal grief, war, and material failure to find a place where the spirit may repose. An American story about rediscovering where we’ve been and how we’ve come to be who we are today, Abbeville tells the tale of the world in small, of one man’s pilgrimage to come to terms with himself while learning to embrace the world around him.
Praise
For Abbeville:
"[H]as some true things to say about very American ideas of manhood and success and the relationships among fathers, sons, brothers, grandfathers, and grandsons." —Library Journal
"[A] resonant, intricate saga of the multigenerational Bailey/Schumpeter family of Abbeville. . . . Fuller's a talented writer, and his gifts are on full display." —Publishers Weekly
"Abbeville is wonderful, an evocative and involving tale about the meanings of success and failure across the generations and the values that unite a family through time. A terrific novel." —Scott Turow
"In his new novel, Abbeville, Jack Fuller once again brilliantly illuminates how it is that smart, decent, striving, flawed people wrestle with the essential issues of modern life and with the powerful forces of culture and family that have shaped their attitudes and are seeming to drive their fate. If you don’t know the extraordinary creative work of Jack Fuller, this is a perfect place for you to begin. He has long been snug in the palm of the handful of America’s best novelists, though too often overlooked there. By all the righteous stars of serious culture, Abbeville will bring Fuller the wide literary acclaim and audience he richly deserves." —Robert Olen Butler
"Jack Fuller has written a wonderful novel. Abbeville put me in mind of Theodore Dreiser at his most tender, far-seeing, and astute. I hope it finds the widest possible audience." —Ward Just
"Fuller's straight-forward prose allows the reader to move effortlessly through several generations of one family coping with success and failure. The landscapes of rural, urban, and suburban life are compelling and haunting. George traces his grandparents' lives as he struggles with his lack of confidence to weather the economic storm that threatens his own family. . . . This is a solid and satisfying read." —Sunny Solomon, Clayton Books (CA)
"George Bailey’s security vanished with the dot.com crash. His grandfather lived through the 1929 market crash and subsequent run on his bank and seemed to thrive in the years that followed. Not knowing what else to do, George returns to his grandfather’s house and his grandfather’s town, hoping to find, in his memories, a way forward. This is a wonderful story of America’s heartland. It reminds us that even though we fence it and cultivate it, we never really tame it; and that counting chickens before they hatch is still a fool’s game."—Keri Holmes, The Kaleidoscope: Our Focus is You (IA)
For Jack Fuller's Writing:
“The Best of Jackson Payne will become the standard against which jazz novels are measured. . . . [S]o beautifully imagined, so meticulously informed and so passionately delivered that jazz musicians will nod in approval and writers will shake their heads in envy.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Fuller brilliantly makes authentic all the voices telling the stories, from drug addict’s to doctor’s. . . . [H]e is a man who can ably connect dots that others cannot readily see.” —New York Times Book Review
“Readers may think they’ve already heard this story of addiction, race and passion, but Fuller’s unflinching and searing novel tells it like never before. . . .” —Publishers Weekly
“[The Best of Jackson Payne is one] of the few novels about jazz to recognize that language may never capture the magic of the music but may just evoke the hell out of it.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Jack Fuller’s writing about jazz is the most vivid and inspired that I’ve encountered in fiction. . . . Slowly and fatefully [The Best of Jackson Payne] surrounds and, finally, beautifully captures an enigmatic life.” —Scott Turow
“Quite simply, one of the best novels I have ever read. . . . Fuller has written an American classic.” —Robert Olen Butler
“An ambitious and tightly controlled novel. . . . Shapeliness and a sense of larger design [are] elegantly executed in Fragments.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“[Fragments is] the best novel yet about the Vietnam War. . . It ranks with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity.” —The Wall Street Journal
“An elegant, restrained, elegiac novel which succeeds where louder and more insistent works have failed.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“[Fragments] deserves to be ranked amongst the most vivid and searching treatments of Vietnam.” —The [London] Observer
“There have been many books on Vietnam, and there will be many others. [Fragments] is more a novel than the rest.” —The Boston Globe
“Slow-burning, elegantly meditative and suspenseful.” —The [London] Sunday Times
“Jack Fuller’s Convergence can claim to be one of the best pieces of spy-fi to have emerged in the last twenty years. It is a remarkable book.” —Time Out [London]
“A brilliant achievement. . . . Like the best work of Greene and Le Carré, it is more than genre fiction; it is literature. . . [Convergence] is the most plausible, and perhaps the best spy novel ever written by an American.” —The Chicago Tribune
Bio
Jack Fuller has published six critically acclaimed novels and one book of non-fiction about journalism. He has been a legal affairs writer, a war correspondent in Vietnam, a Washington correspondent, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer.
Three of his novels have been included in the University of Chicago Press’s distinguished Phoenix Fiction series. In 2005 he retired from a career in newspapers to concentrate on book writing. He began working in journalism at the age of 16 as a copyboy for the Chicago Tribune. Along the way he has worked for the Washington Post, Chicago Daily News, City News Bureau of Chicago, and Pacific Stars and Stripes. He left journalism for law briefly when U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi asked him to serve as his special assistant in the Department of Justice. At the Chicago Tribune he served as editor of the editorial page, editor, and publisher. When he retired, he was president of Tribune Publishing Co.
A graduate of Northwestern University and Yale Law School, he lives in Chicago with his wife, Debra Moskovits. He has two children, Tim and Kate.
A Note From the Author
All his grandchildren loved my grandfather. We (my two cousins and I) were born to the city, and he delighted in showing us the more relaxed pleasures of life in the little downstate Illinois farm town where he had spent his life.
When we knew him, he seemed a simple man, tending the local two-room school as its janitor and delivering the mail with his wooden hand-cart. We knew that at one point he had been something more. After all, his name was written in big, fading block letters on the grain elevator, the folks in town seemed to respect him well beyond his station, and our mothers had told us vague but painful stories about how he had been flattened in the Depression. Still, none of this made it seem odd that he was so totally happy.
Then one day long after he and my grandmother had died my mother told me that he had gone to prison for two years for embezzling money from the small, rural bank he owned.
Since then his story has haunted me—as a cautionary tale, as a mystery, as an American tragedy.
At some point the company I worked for discovered a major fraud in one of the newspapers that reported to me. As I worked through the complexities of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, a criminal investigation by federal and local prosecutors, and the financial fallout from a few individuals’ human flaws, I thought again and again about my grandfather. I was already deeply into Abbeville by then, but the danger and the moral challenge I faced made the book I was working on feel like a pistol to my head.
I have taken great liberties with my grandfather’s true story. Many of the people and incidents I simply made up. But in the end I am satisfied that the essential character of William Tegge lives in the pages of this book.
Excerpt
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A man emerged from the office, drying his hands on a paper towel. He wasn’t as weathered as a farmer, and though he was probably in his thirties, he had the face of a boy.
“Henry Mueller,” said the young man. “My grandfather and yours were good friends. He was Henry, too. Harley Ansel was his nephew, but my grandfather didn’t have any use for him after what he done to yours. Go ahead and fill it up.”
I pushed open the screen door. They were predicting showers, but there was no sign of them yet. The little vane in the glass bubble on the face of the old pump spun as the gasoline streamed over it, just as it had when my father had filled up his used Ford on Sunday afternoons for the drive back to Park Forest.
“This ought to cover it,” I said, coming back through the door and pulling a twenty from my pocket.
“How much was it?” he asked.
“Nineteen seventy-six,” I said. “Keep it.”
The mechanic pulled open a drawer and rooted around in it for coins.
“There,” he said. “We’re square.”
“I’ve been thinking about my grandfather a lot lately,” I said.
“Some say the bubble busting like it done could bring on another Depression,” said the mechanic.
“That’s what raised the ghost for me, all right,” I said.
“Then you’d better stop trying to pay more than you owe,” the mechanic said. “Ask your grandfather’s ghost where generosity got him.”