The Smallest Color

Rating:
Summary: Exhuberant, Suspenseful, and Erotic
Review: Bill Roorbach's first novel is a thrilling and tender tale that moves swiftly and with stunning clarity between the past and the present in order to conjure the life of Coop Henry and slowly unravel the role he played in the death of his radical, violent, charismatic older brother. What I love most about this novel (and about all of Bill Roorbach's work in fiction and creative nonfiction) is the passion of his narrative. His people are brimming with delight even in the midst of their suffering. They are joyful companions for the reader because they see and embrace the natural world, their lovers, their own exquisite and haunted memories. Coop Henry awakens us with his desire to speak the truth. For decades, he has lived a lie, pretending his brother Hodge is still alive, living underground or in another country. As long as Coop is trapped in an unloving marriage, as long as he allows himself to be estranged from his mother and father, as long as he denies the full force of the fear and rage and love he felt for his brother Hodge, he can sustain the illusion. But a new love shatters him, returns him to the memories of his first love, the tall cowgirl who seduced and betrayed and transformed him. Remembering her means remembering Hodge as he truly was. Finally, the novel becomes a letter to Hodge--a rant, a confession, a plea for understanding and forgiveness, a confrontation, a communion. This is holy work, the work of love that is large enough to include grief and guilt and anger. Bill Roorbach offers us a rare vision, a glimpse of the violence we all endured and prepetrated during the Vietnam years--and he shows us the path we must walk if we ever wish to transcend the damage we have done to ourselves and others. Coop Henry is a man who insists on the possibility of love, who would rather risk being destroyed by the truth than face being smothered in silence. THE SMALLEST COLOR sings! The language is lyrical and surprising, the voices crisp and mesmerizing. I loved spending time with Coop Henry, and his intimate letter to Hodge seemed like a letter to me. We were that close, and his story became absolutely necessary.

Rating:
Summary: a job well done
Review: Congratulations, Bill, on an excellent novel! I picked up this one and "Big Bend" at approximately the same time a few months ago and was thrilled with each! The generally quiet, brief dramas of the short-story collection led beautifully into this longer, more fully-explored novel.

As a former student of yours a few years back at OSU, it was with decidedly great anticipation and pleasure that I opened up this novel. I remember your reading on campus of the "Bucket!" scene (still my favorite passage, I think) and I had been eager to hear the whole thing. You didn't disappoint. Thanks for all you taught (and continue to teach me) about what it means to write. Your "Writing Life Stories" book is invaluable to me--I open it up and can almost feel myself back in your classroom again. Thank you, and keep up the good work!

PS - I gave you four stars here only because I want to see if you can top this with your next one!

Rating:
Summary: The Smallest Color Remembers
Review: The title comes from a Delmore Swartz poem that says it all in the quotation from the book's proem: "What am I now that I was then?/ May memory restore again and again/ The smallest color of the smallest day."
The memory of a middle-aged man brings back the admiration and the emulation he had for his delinquent older brother, whose opposition to the Vietnam War and the social conventions of that period brought about his strange death. An engrossing mystery surrounds this death through the intricate juxtaposition of that memory and the current life of the narrator-brother in the 1990s. The novel is an exciting page-turner that takes us into the family, the marriage, and love life of the surviving brother.
Roorbach has used all his artful prose to produce a novel with the same appeal as his book of stories: BIG BEND. He has selected the powerful relationship between brothers and the curious twists of memory as vehicles to produce n intriguing first novel.