Coal Run

Rating:
Summary: A real look at real people
Review: Miss O'Dell's second novel, Coal Run, is an honest portrait of life in a small town in the now almost abandoned coal fields of Pennsylvania. The economic impact of a failed industry on the town members is played out in an engaging, well defined look at the lives of a small group of survivors, both those who stayed in the dying town, and those who left.

Ivan Zoschenko, former star high school football athlete, represents both groups, having left the town after a career ending injury. His need for an a new life takes him to Florida where everyone is a newcomer and there are very few roots of friends and family. His longing for the remembered security of his youth in Coal Run never leaves him. His return to his home and his reinvolvement with people from his youth is full of conflicting emotions as he deals with a culture not willing or wanting change in any form. The long history of dealing with the disasters that are part of coal mining has resulted in a tired, cynical population just trying to survive as best they can.Ivan understands their world, but can never rejoin it.

The release of a vicious prisoner and his impact on the town stirs up memories and secrets that affect them all.O'Dell masterfully lets the characters speak for themselves as they struggle once more to survive. Coal Run is honest, compelling and starkly realistic. It is headed for the best seller list, where it belongs.

Rating:
Summary: another masterpiece from a masterful writer
Review: Tawni O'Dell tunnels deep into her characters so that they seem to be walking right off the pages. The terrain here, as in her superlative "Back Roads", is Pennsylvania--and it's country that's as alive as her characters. Ivan Zoschenko comes home around the same time a former teammate is about to be released from prison. Memories unravel, secrets come to light, people confront each other--and themselves. The book is flatout brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Rating:
Summary: "You always belong where you're from"
Review: Tawni O'Dell's lyrical, ambitious and tension-filled novel seems to emerge and explode onto the page. The story is rendered in such a tightly disciplined prose that the reader will probably be left overwhelmed by the strength of the author's vision. Ivan Zoschenko "the Great Ivan Z" is an aging, former football hero and drifter who has lost his father in a mine explosion that shattered the town of Coal Run thirty years ago. Now living in Florida he is sent a newspaper article telling him that an old teammate, Reese Rayner is about to be released from prison after fifteen years for murder and is heading back to the town. Reese had violently and brutally mutilated his wife, who was so badly battered that she remains hooked up to life support in a convalescent home run by Ivan's compassionate and kindly mother. Ivan returns to Coal Run a weather-beaten man intent on revenge - a man who remains bitter, angry, and with a penchant for wayward drinking. He scrapes out a living working as a local deputy, and sleeps either in his truck or on the sofa at his sister, Jolene's house. The story takes place over one week, from Sunday to Friday, as Ivan, conflicted with pent-up and astringent fury, begins to settle old scores, face the mistakes he made in his careless youth, and reconnect with the people he's either treated badly or ignored.

Packed into this bitterly powerful novel, is a dazzling array of well-chiseled, colorful characters: Ivan's former teenage idol Val Claypool, hangs around the town, and reminisces with a sense of palpable regret his time in the Vietnam War, where he lost his friends and his leg. The climate of mutual need is blended with a deep-seated contempt in the Raynor family, where Jeff Rayner, unemployed, desperate, and unable to provide for his wife, Bobbie and their children, is driven to the brink of fury and despair. The spent anger, the family dysfunction, the desperation, and the sense of disappointed lives going nowhere permeate this hard-edged story. Coal Run is not just a searing portrait of one man's chronicle of personal tragedy, but also a bitterly acute commentary on one community's disaffected and disparate inhabitants.

The book is strongest when it sticks to the poetic descriptions of and the destruction and the sense of hopelessness of Coal Run and the surrounding areas. The explosion in "Gertie," the local mine, left a town visibly on fire, and an entire community gone: houses raised, buckled sidewalks and driveways leading to nowhere and nothing, lawn ornaments and bicycles left behind in weed-choked yards. The coal that had once provided the town with life has turned to poison beneath it and caused its death. Questions of regret, disappointment, love, loss and the fragility of human life are woven together as Ivan tries to understand how he can dislike a town he still loves, how he can envy a way of life he doesn't necessarily want to have, and how he needed to leave his home in order to realize that it actually is his home.

Coal Run is richly and tautly rendered, and O'Dell has the shear narrative skill to present a story that is both complex and multi-layered. Her prose is meticulously whittled and surefooted and her powers of description are exacting and uncompromising - for one terrible instant Ivan feels he's been manipulated and pitted against the town for reasons he just doesn't understand and by forces beyond his control. Coal Run is narrated in a generous, patient, and intelligent voice, and the author almost presents the subject matter from the perspective of an insider, clear eyed and without sentimentality. This is a fine novel, about a man and a community who feels they have lost everything, and consequently, stands empty handed. Redemption and deliverance do come to Ivan and the townspeople of Coal Run, but only after much soul-searching, hurting, and pain. Mike Leonard June 04