Book Review: Hard Rain Falling
"Hard Rain Falling" by Don Carpenter
The Copy
Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling is a tough-as-nails account of being down and out, but never down for good - a Dostoyevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption. The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary confinement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class: married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But neither Jack nor Billy can escape their troubled pasts, and they will meet again in San Quentin before their strange double drama comes to a violent and revelatory end.
The Review
Spoiler-Free
First, shout-out to Tony from A Life on Books for the recommendation on this novel. It is the first in his Book Club. You can find out more on Instagram or in the Discord.
In the introduction, George Pelecanos refers to Hard Rain Falling as “the most unheralded important American novel of the 1960s;” a grandiose if somewhat dubious distinction. New York Review Books (NYRB) brought this novel back into print in 2009, and it functions as a reminder of how many great works of literature go unrecognized, forgotten, and eventually out of print.
Hard Rain Falling is excellent. This is the type of story that is right in my wheelhouse: gritty and noir-ish, morally grey characters with depth, and underpinning it all a critique of the kind of gruff masculinity that pervades so much of American culture. This is a crime novel, a prison novel, but - to me - it’s also a love story. That underlying heart beneath the harsh exterior elevates this book to the next level.
The somewhat dual protagonists, Jack and Billy, are mere boys in this story, progressing into early adulthood. Their personalities reflect back what society has shown them. Jack, the unloved orphan, is hard, amoral and hedonistic. Billy, the runaway, is looking for the attention he never got at home, putting on a stereotypic masquerade as part of his billiards hustle. They are believable young men caught in the man-boxes that society has built for them. Their resistance and/or yielding to society’s wants and needs drives the story of HRF.
This is a character-heavy novel. While plenty of things happen, there isn’t a strict, by-the-numbers plot. Carpenter gets deep into the interiority at numerous different points and really lets you inhabit the twisted, stream of consciousness of his character. It is masterfully done. Some of the best interiority I’ve had the privilege of reading. The twists and turns of the story aren’t what makes this novel, it is the depth of Carpenter’s characters.
Overall, I give Hard Rain Falling 💧💧💧💧💧 5 hard rain drops out of 5. This is a hidden gem of American literature and I’m happy to have read it and been moved by it. If you’ve read HRF (or aren’t afraid of spoilers, there’s more below the break).
A Little Extra
Here Be Spoilers
…wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream.
That quote is one of two moments in the book where I realized Don Carpenter was on another level. The prose in HRF is usually matter of fact, terse. But Carpenter slips into character’s introspection and really gives you a feel for the free-flow of thought and association that reveals the hidden depths of his protagonists, especially Jack Levitt.
While it’s hard to really love Jack Levitt, you feel for him. Carpenter does not present him as a hero, or an anti-hero, or a villain. Just a man struggling against the uncaring universe, the broken justice system, and a society designed for the haves and not the have-nots. Carpenter does an excellent job of exploring the precarity of people of the fringe of society. Often, they are only one mistake away from losing their freedom and their already scant opportunities.
Jack ends up in a reform school and in Chapter Seven, Carpenter walks us through the psychological and physical torture of Jack’s time in solitary confinement. It is arresting and brutal and written so well that if you don’t empathize with Jack you might want to see a cardiologist about your missing heart. This is done in that stream of consciousness style, juxtaposing Jack’s current “freedom” with his former confinement and putting up Jack’s hidden depth as a black mirror to his old friend Denny’s vapid meanderings through life. But ultimately that “freedom” is short-lived and it’s Jack’s association with Denny that lands in him prison.
I keep putting scare-quotes around “freedom,” because one of the themes Carpenter focuses on is the illusions we have of what freedom is and what it means. Even on the outside Jack feels confined to a set of choices and decisions. He goes along with them because he doesn’t know any other way. He is a train on the track and he can only go one way. His greatest moment of freedom comes while locked in San Quentin with Billy Lancing. I won’t go into the detail, but Carpenter’s prose is spartan in those scenes and that gives it a matter-of-factness that is profound.
The other moving piece for me comes towards the end of the novel when Jack is released from San Quentin, falls in “love,” and gets married. He and his wife are spending a day at the beach, and we learn that Jack has never really seen the ocean. Never experienced its power and vastness and it inspires a sense of childlike wonder in him; a glimpse of the child he never got a chance to be, only to have it cuttingly ended by a terse exchange with some divers. Reducing Jack back to his “man-box” with a quick “fuck you.”
Jack’s story is ultimately heart-breaking and sad. His push and pull against societal forces never yield love or happiness, whether he’s going with the flow or fighting against the currents. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Hard Rain Falling fell out of print: it’s crushing nihilism. Jack ends up where he began: alone. The through-line of the story is summarized neatly in a conversation with the man who will marry Jack’s wife and raise Jack’s son. Myron Bronson tells Jack that Jack was dealt a lousy hand but played it about as well as he could. In the end though, the game is fixed. Guys like Myron always win and guys like Jack always lose. Tough luck, kid.
It is little cold comfort that the Epilogue reveals Myron’s victory is pyrrhic. In the world of Hard Rain Falling, even the victors are miserable.