Ceremony in Lone Tree

Rating:
Summary: A ghost town on the road between Hope and Hopelessness
Review: This is a dark comedy, written in the late 1950s and set somewhere in the middle of the author's home-state, Nebraska. It's also very much a mid-century view by an American author, somewhat still under the literary shadow of Faulkner, as well as the shadow of the Bomb. The characters are Nebraska-born and only vaguely aware that the world they grew up in no longer exists. Frontier violence long a thing of the past for them, they are troubled by the reemergence of violence in their midst -- particularly the killing spree of a young man (based loosely on Charles Starkweather), who murders 10 people before he is captured, and a high school student who runs down two others because he's "tired of being pushed around."

The book is told from the point of view of 10 characters, most of whom are members of an extended family who gather to observe the 90th birthday of the family patriarch. Born when the West was first settled, he has lived his whole life in a hotel along the railroad tracks of a prairie town, Lone Tree, which like the tree it's named after has been dead for many years. The old man is the only resident. His three grown daughters, their husbands, and offspring are joined by a boyhood friend of theirs and a young woman he has met along the road. They bicker, bring up old grievances, and carry on in their idiosyncracies like a cast of characters in a farcical 1950s sitcom.

Almost plotless, the novel interweaves the characters' various obsessions, revealed in their almost aimless conversations, quirky behavior, and the time-worn grooves of thought in their respective streams of consciousness. Morris, meanwhile, touches on many themes, a central one being the struggle to maintain hope in a world where so many events, large and small, discourage it. After converging for a day and moonlit night in this ghost town once full of frontier promise of growth and prosperity, the characters climb aboard a moth-eaten covered wagon and strike off westward to who knows what promised land.

Readers of contemporary authors like William Styron and Richard Yates will find a familiar resonance in this densely written, closely observed, slow-paced novel. I recommend it to anyone interested in America's postwar generation of writers who, like Jack Kerouac, saw through the sunny surface of those often complacent years to the shadows underneath.