HARD RAIN FALLING - DON CARPENTER

AVAILABLE

Bought this on a total whim. It was on sale at the bookstore near my house and I felt like a needed a quick novel to get through, to entertain me during my retirement. Plus the back of the book comes with praise from Richard Price, Jonathan Lethem and George Pelecanos wrote the intro (which gives away major, interesting plot points, I would urge you not to read it if you’re going to read this book. That being said, I will be spoiling the book in this “review”). It did not disappoint. This book is interesting and compelling to me on two levels. First, on the level of plot and story and what’s in the actual book. The stuff that would have been compelling in 1964, when this book was published, and will be of interest in 100 years (assuming people are still reading books/novels). On that level the book is about the sort of rootless, rambling young man who’s looking to find some sort of meaning in his life that we see all over literature. This book comes out at what one could consider the tail end of the beat era or towards the beginning of the hippy counter-culture era so these sorts of narratives (ON THE ROAD being the apogee of  this line) are not in sort supply. HARD RAIN FALLING is an unbelievably bleak entry into this cannon. The wondering and restlessness and search for meaning that the main character, Jack, undergoes is never broken up with moments of rapture or clarity. Things don’t work out for him. He doesn’t have cool friends who are writers with big ides nor does he get lucky in terms of the people he mets on his journey. Jack himself is violent, in a world of violence and from a linage that the prologue makes clear stretches back since before his birth. At first I thought the books suffered from the classic male-writer pitfall of ridiculous female characters (esp. in a book like this that takes place in such a misogynistic milieu) but the final third of the book features Jack trying to make a marriage and kid work with a slumming-it rich girl who i thought was interesting, well-drawn and believable. 

The other level this book works on concerns its function as a historical document. The book came out in 1964 and offers us a glimpse into pre-mass incarceration prison and pre-stonewall male sexuality. Jack is institutionalized his entire life, from growing up in orphanages to Juvie to San Quinten, the book does a good job showing how these different systems are interconnected and turn Jack into the sort of person he cannot successfully live outside of this level of control. It’s sad that Foucault never got to read this, he would have been thrilled. There is a whole middle section that acts as a sort of prison Gulliver’s travels where Jack visit various different California prison and are run in different manners (some are very lose and anarchic, others are deeply controlling) and comments on the nature of prison and how people like him struggle to stay alive and form identity. Also, since this book takes place in the 50’s and 60’s it’s pre-mass incarceration so Jack and folks like him are getting couple year sentences for things like armed robbery or statutory rape or assault (though they do attempt to put Jack on death row for kidnapping at one point) that would most certainly get you put away forever nowadays. The other fascinating part is the stuff about male sexuality. At the beginning Jack is young and horny and very whore-focused. He recounts frequently how boring it all gets but keeps at it. However, during the mid-section of the book he becomes sexually involved with another inmate at San Quentin. There a lot about prison sexuality generally (masturbation stuff, stuff about rape, etc.) but this relationship is really interesting and well drawn. It begins as physical and desperate the changes into something that Jack can’t really put his finger on. When he leaves the prison he goes back to heterosexual sex but frequently thinks about and remarks upon what these instances mean to his sexuality, seen as a whole. Plus, his lover is black and the racial politics of their world (broadly as well as in the prison) is explored in ways that are not cringe-y to read 50+ years later and actually offer insight into how men thought of homosexual experiences and “sexual identity” during these times. The strangest thing about this book is that Carpenter, I learned from the bio at the beginning, was one of Richard Brautigan’s best friends. This book is so far from the quiet, slow, melancholic and stoned world of Brautigan it’s hard to believe, but I suppose their friendship started after this book was written. Either way, a good read. 17 windowless prisons.