Before We Sleep

March 27, 2017
In his novel set in Vermont between the end of World War II and the early ’60s, Lent switches between the perspectives of a mother and daughter growing in different directions, but also growing closer as secrets from the past are revealed. Katey Snow and her mother, Ruth, have a strained relationship at the best of times. At age 17, when Katey discovers that Oliver Snow, the man she has looked up to her entire life, is not her biological father, she silently steals away from her parents’ house with a bundle of letters from a mysterious army friend of Oliver’s to learn for herself the truth of her mother’s past and her own beginning. Shifting between the end of the war and the political fallout of the following decades, Lent draws a parallel across time, connecting the vastly different yet similar lives of a mother and daughter each struggling to find her way through the secrets that have defined her—often not through their own doing. Lent’s fine prose depicts the touching physical and emotional journeys of the Snow family against a backdrop of the magical New England landscape.

February 15, 2017
The anxious aftermath of World War II and the turbulent confusion of the late 1960s provide the dual settings for Lent's latest exploration of the American psyche (A Slant of Light, 2015, etc.).Katey Snow is just 17 when she takes off from her home in Vermont, headed for Virginia on an odyssey set in motion by a stunning family revelation. Its precise nature slowly becomes clear as Katey's journey crosscuts with the history of her parents' marriage, shadowed by Oliver Snow's traumatic experiences as a soldier in Germany. Lent, a quietly bold writer who rarely takes the expected path, makes this novel as much about mothers and daughters as about men and war. Jo Hale tries to warn daughter Ruth that dreamy, melancholic Oliver is unlikely to come back whole, and her warnings are borne out by the postwar silences that fester between the couple even though they love each other. And the disclosure that unmoored Katey was the culmination of years of sniping between her and Ruth, for whom her daughter incarnates the forces of unruly change threatening to shatter her world's precarious equilibrium. Katey, for her part, views Ruth as "a tired bitter woman with a wasted life," a cruel adolescent observation belied by Lent's delicate portrait of the complicated realities of Ruth's and Oliver's lives, both sustained and constrained by their close-knit families and their small-town society. As usual, Lent brings his fictional world alive in brilliant physical detail: thickly textured descriptions of the fiddle-playing that consoles Oliver, of Ruth's cooking, and of the varied landscapes through which Katey drives. The Vietnam-era background is slightly more rote than Lent's perfect rendering of 1940s America (getting over the Good War by not actually talking about it), and Katey is a somewhat less interesting character than her parents. But the interplay between their stories makes for a heartbreaking examination of the fraught bonds of kinship and community. Beautifully written and powerfully compassionate: more fine work from a modern master.

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March 15, 2017

In Lent's (In the Fall) elegaic sixth novel, 17-year-old Katey Snow sneaks out of her Vermont home while her parents sleep, hitting the road in search of answers to a family secret. Armed with three years of savings and a pack of old letters, Katey embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes her from the coast of Maine to a small town in Virginia: it is the summer of 1966, and the winds of change are in the air. Chronicling Katey's parents' fledgling marriage with piercing acuity, Lent devotes half the narrative to that earlier generation. For Ruth and Oliver Snow, World War II changed everything: he returns home from service unable to communicate or take pleasure in anything, save for a family tradition of repairing fiddles. But a fateful visit from an old army buddy triggers something in Oliver and sets in motion an indiscretion that forms the reason for Katey's quest. As the past catches up with the present, Ruth and Katey, from their own vantage points, strive to find understanding in each other. VERDICT Lent's luxurious and deliberate writing is in no rush to deliver its ample rewards. For admirers of Emma Cline's The Girls, here is a less sensational but worthy companion.--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2017
One night in 1960, teenager Katey Snow steals the family pickup and slips away to seek her father's former army buddy, a man she hopes can shed light on half-buried family secrets. Interspersed with Katey's experiences are those of her parents, Ruth and Oliver, as they are forever changed by WWII. Lent (A Slant of Light, 2015) returns to familiar territory here: complicated familial relationships and the effects of war. In third-person, stream-of-consciousness prose, he combines exacting descriptions of the everyday with a realism that alternates between illuminating and mundane. The Vermont setting is well realized, especially as contrasted with Virginia, where Katey's road trip ends, a journey that includes both revelation and unforeseen violence. Lent's characterization rings true, from minor players, such as a German organic food-store owner, to Katey and her naive lack of insight into her mother's temperament. Lent has been compared to Faulkner, and the parallels between the cultural divides of the 1960s and current events make this a solid choice for readers of literary fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)