Where the Roots Lead: Jack Fuller’s ‘Abbeville’

The resilience to rebound after financial ruin lies at the heart of Jack Fuller’s lovely, layered novel, “Abbeville” (Unbridled, 272 pages, $24.95), set across multiple generations of a Midwestern family. The novel, never losing sight of life’s spiritual mystery, shows how friendship and family bonds can buoy one along a roller-coaster journey of market downturns and other painful losses.After George Bailey is wiped out in the dot-com crash, he returns to the Illinois town where his grandfather, Karl Schumpeter, was himself ruined during the Depression. Staying in his grandfather’s former house, Bailey explores his family’s past to regain a sense of direction and understanding of his own life.The narrative pulses from the country to the city and back. In his youth, the grandfather Schumpeter was employed in a logging company in the North Woods, a job that involved doing business with Indians. He later heads to work on a raucous commodity trading floor in Chicago where, as a country boy in the bustling city, he stumbles at first through a few amusing episodes.Schumpeter later returns to the farm town of Abbeville, where he builds a thriving business by taking advantage of the telegraph. He becomes a civic leader presiding over bringing electric streetlamps to the town. This town pillar’s family name adorns a grain elevator in large, four-foot letters. But when the Depression arrives, anxious townsfolk arrive to claim their money at his bank, in a scene that recalls the film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” (Schumpeter’s grandson, Bailey, is named after the film’s lead character.)Schumpeter sinks further, ultimately going to jail for financial misdealings. When he emerges, he tends a schoolhouse and delivers mail. Despite reduced circumstances, Schumpeter retains his equanimity.Robert Frost once noted that he could sum up all he had learned in life in three words: “It goes on.” This rich novel unfolds in a way that exemplifies this insight, while gathering the sounds and texture of the Midwestern heartland, serving up a swath of Americana along the way; a scene involving boyhood mischief with a pellet rifle might have made Huck Finn smile.Mr. Fuller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer, whose other works include “The Best of Jackson Payne,” a jazz novel. “Abbeville” has its own chords — such as canoeing or fishing excursions, in which are discovered catastrophic eddies swirling just below life’s surface. After one such river maelstrom, Schumpeter “did not feel close to death,” Mr. Fuller writes. “He felt that he was close to the truth of his life.”The novel is preceded by philosopher Hannah Arendt’s words describing mortality as moving along a “line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.” Framing the lives of a grandfather and grandson, but encompassing many others, “Abbeville” ultimately raises the question of when and how a life, caught up in cycles large and small, might be considered a success.gshapiro@nysun.com

Where the Roots Lead: Jack Fuller’s ‘Abbeville’

Where the Roots Lead: Jack Fuller’s ‘Abbeville’

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