Northwest Corner: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)I did a quick second reading of Reservation Road prior to reading Northwest Corner. While it's not strictly necessary, I do recommend doing so if you have the time and inclination. It really enhanced my enjoyment of Northwest Corner to have the characters fresh in my mind and compare the past with the present.
When we last saw Sam Arno in Reservation Road, he was a sleepy boy of ten, asking his dad if they could go sledding later. He hadn't a clue that his life would change forever on that day.
Now Sam is a quiet, confused, surly 22-year-old UConn baseball star. His anger boils over one night in a bar, and he commits a savage act of violence. Fearing arrest, he flees to Southern California, seeking the father he hasn't seen or spoken to in twelve years. His father Dwight has made a fresh start in Santa Barbara, where no one knows about the hit-and-run death of Josh Learner all those years ago.
Sam's crisis gives us a chance to revisit some of Reservation Road's central characters and see the long-term effects of what happened twelve years ago. We get the story through the perspectives of five characters, with Dwight Arno's being the central, first-person narrative. Members of the Learner family are represented, but Northwest Corner is largely the story of what used to be the Arno family: Sam, Dwight, and his ex-wife Ruth. I found Ruth to be the most admirable character, which is quite a shift from the way I viewed her in Reservation Road. She has a lot of history to overcome, and she gives Dwight more grace than he deserves. Ruth has the additional burden of handling a serious health crisis alone, and she does so with strength and dignity.
Schwartz doesn't hit you in the face with what you're supposed to get from the book. These are damaged people doing what humans do. It's up to you to decide how well they've handled their pain, and what's possible for them in the future. If you have wounds of your own, always know where your tissues are. You may find yourself a little weepy. There are moments of clarity that will resonate with your experiences and, if you're lucky, show you a new way of seeing them.
This novel has greater complexity in both content and sentence structure than Reservation Road. The change in writing style does require some adjustment. For me, this wasn't a difficult adjustment to make, and I read Northwest Corner in about two days. (4.5 stars)


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The New York Times Book Review called Reservation Road "a triumph," and the novel was universally acclaimed. Now, in a brilliant literary performance by one of our most compelling and compassionate writers, John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road's unforgettable characters in a superb new work of fiction that stands magnificently on its own. Northwest Corner is a riveting story about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life's most difficult and unexpected challenges.Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn't revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he's hidden.Sam, Dwight's estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam's sense of guilt is as crushing as his father's. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.Told in the resonant voices of everyday people gripped in the emotional riptide of lived life, Northwest Corner is at once tough and heart-lifting, an urgent, powerful story about family bonds that can never be broken and the wayward roads that lead us back to those we love.

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