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The New Valley
by Josh Weil
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Hardcover
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN13: 9780802118912
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
The linked novellas that comprise Josh Weil’s masterful debut bring us into America’s remote, unforgiving backcountry, and delicately unveil the private worlds of three very different men as they confront love, loss, and their own personal demons.
Set in the hardscrabble hill country between West Virginia and Virginia, The New Valley is populated by characters striving to forge new lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices—from a soft-spoken beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad’s suicide; to a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; to a mildly retarded man who falls for a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that wounds them both—each novella is a vivid examination of Weil’s uniquely romanticized relationships. As the men struggle against grief, solitude, and fixation, their desperation leads them all to commit acts that bring both ruin and salvation.
Reminiscent of Bobbie Ann Mason, Annie Proulx, and Kent Haruf in its deeply American tone, The New Valley is a tender exploration of resilience, isolation, and the consuming ache for human connection. Weil’s empathetic, meticulous prose makes this is a debut of inescapable power.
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| A rare find |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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In our fast-paced, increasingly urbanized world, Josh Weil's novella collection "The New Valley" is a gem. Weil has a gift for naturalistic description. His resonant prose is avidly attentive to landscape, as though distilled from many hours of meditative observation. Yet, despite this, the narratives are expertly paced, their events unfolding organically from the setting and characters, often in quiet yet surprising ways. I highly recommend!
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| Josh Weil: One to watch! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I adored this collection of novellas, but I fell particularly in love with "Sarverville Remains," an achingly beautiful story told from the point-of-view of, for want of a much better word, a "retarded" young man, who falls in love with Mrs. Podawalski, a local exotic dancer. Josh Weil handles this relationship with a delicacy and beauty that left me in awe. He is an incredibly talented writer, one to watch!
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| An evocative and moving book |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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As a reader of Jim Harrison's novellas, I was very impressed with Weil's debut. Unlike a lot of collections you read, the three novellas here are actually very different from each other, mostly in terms of what actually happens in them, but also in the way they're told, the style of the writing (the third is a crazy narrative told from the point of view of a mentally handicapped man who has found himself in a dangerous love triangle), yet they are similar in all the right ways so that the book delivers a deeply felt portrait of bleak rural life, and packs a hell of an emotional punch. There are authors who seem to be able to really bring a place alive, to imagine something in such a real way that you just believe they know what they're talking about. Harrison does that, and one of my other favorites, Cormac McCarthy, does it, and Josh Weil does it too. The New Valley is a fully imagined book, with stunning descriptions and many breathtaking details, full of sad, haunted men, and it's obvious that Weil knows these people as well as he knows the land. Like Ethan Canin, Weil writes like a much older man. But he's obviously young enough to have just been named one of the "5 under 35" writers to watch by the National Book Awards people which, once you've read this, won't come as a surprise.
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| A Deft Parody |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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In The New Valley, Josh Weil has executed a remarkably comprehensive and mostly subtle parody of the Carpetbagging genre. A strict line-by-line reading will prove these novellas are not maudlin, nor melodramatic and the lack of such extremes makes the work at times seem almost sincere. But the characters are drawn from a stable of distorted stereotypes-the protagonists are retarded (socially, emotionally, and mentally), while the supporting players are prone to insane violence and the leading women are unilaterally promiscuous-and serve as the first clue that the author is 'funning', as it were.
Further toward this end, Mr. Weil litters the text with a multitude of small hints-mainly conspicuous dialectical oddities that are not representative of local speech seasoned with dashes of ignorance about the character's vocations and other everyday matters-that informed readers will take as winks and nudges. He is smiling with us. Occasionally he chances more blatant departures from reason-a hunter ruining his own hunting, a herd of cattle causelessly slaughtered, a man destroying his own property, again, causelessly-that bring the work perilously close to outright farce, but such measures are forgivable insofar as they are necessary to allow the widest audience to smile along.
A device I particularly favored was the New Englandization of Southwest Virginia, via the importation of clam chowder, cranberry sauce, turtleneck sweaters and full-service gas stations. But Mr. Weil has been nothing if not thorough and there are so many such techniques on display that it quickly becomes impossible to select a favorite.
In the title, a longstanding literary tradition of portraying actual places under fictional names is subverted to inspired effect. It is one thing to fictionalize a place, but to simply edit the name of a region under the auspices of artistic license? Pitch perfect hauteur. The lengths of the works themselves are also at play here; the bucolic settings are established without confronting the devil of detail, suggesting a tourist's dilettantism. Even the author's bio (Born in the...(m)ountains of Virginia) seems designed to suggest hubris, as if an accident of birth were interchangeable with germane experience.
Five stars; an excellent send-up of a tired genre.
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| A Book I Know I'll Read Again |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The characters in The New Valley are flesh and blood. Their lives are not flashy - I may not have even slowed down, if I drove by their house on a rural road. But this book shows that their struggles are primal, and compelling. The writing and pacing are pitch perfect. I have read the book once, and I know I will read it again and again.
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