The Signal Flame

Starred review from November 7, 2016
National Book Award–finalist Krivák continues in the tradition of his debut (The Sojourn) with this bleak but breathtaking second novel. The book opens with the death of the family patriarch, Jozef Vinich, who leaves his sprawling farm in Pennsylvania’s rural Endless Mountains to his daughter, Hannah, and oldest grandson, Bo. While Bo runs the roughing mill, Hannah tends the chickens, and the two await the return of Bo’s brother, Sam, who is reported MIA in Vietnam. Told in three parts stretching from Easter to Christmas Eve 1972, the narrative soon picks up steam with the addition of Ruth, Sam’s pregnant fiancée, and the daughter of the man responsible for killing Hannah’s husband in a hunting mishap. By the third section, more backstory has been revealed—Ruth’s ancestors’ ties to Vinich’s land, Sam’s reasons for enlisting, Hannah’s long-held grudge against Ruth’s father—adding texture and depth to the family’s already rich history. Devastating accidents befall these characters and the heartache they endure is palpable. But there’s love, too. This family saga is quiet at its core, but it’s Krivák’s gorgeous prose and deep grasp of the relationship between longing and loss that make the book such a stunner.

November 1, 2016
Krivak (The Sojourn, 2011, etc.) returns to home ground in this elegiac story of rural life in a time of turmoil.If this were Turgenev, Krivak's characters would be peasants, sturdy caretakers of the soil with a sure awareness that life is hard and fleeting. As it is, the Vinich clan, descended of a Slovak immigrant who saw all he cared to of war in the trenches of Galicia, is a salt-of-the-earth breed, unassuming and mostly steady, even a little wealthy "in a town where land meant wealth." Bo, perhaps the steadiest of them all, goes off to college to read the Greeks and learn a little about the world beyond their narrow valley in the Endless Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania; he returns home to take his place among the sawyers and farmers, even as the patriarch slides toward death and his brother, Sam, ships off to Vietnam, there to be lost--missing in action, the official forms say. Krivak's modest story finds Bo trying to do the right thing by all concerned while living up to some of his book-learned ideals; called on to act heroically, he does so while otherwise serving as the guardian of a fragile mother, the preserver of family memory, and, indeed, the beacon to guide his brother home. In one of the book's most affecting moments, he travels to West Virginia to meet a member of Sam's unit, who evokes the terror of Vietnam: "You want to talk about ghosts? Fucking VC....Not a sound in that jungle except the sticks we broke on the ground and our boots when we pulled them out of the mud." Should they erect a tombstone? Like Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter, set in a neighboring country and addressing some of the same themes, this is a story about love and loyalty, with moments of sudden violence and great beauty. A simple story, on its face, but full of resounding depths: a dark commemoration of a dark time but offering the slim hope that things will get better.

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September 1, 2016
After The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Krivak returns with a family saga set in Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains in 1972. Recently deceased patriarch Jozef Vinich immigrated to America after World War I, daughter Hannah married a Hungarian-born boxer imprisoned for desertion during World War II, and her black-sheep son Sam is now missing in Vietnam. Sam's dutiful brother Bo tills the soil even as war and memory keep the family off-balance.

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