Abbeville

March 17, 2008
Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial writer Fuller (Fragments
) delivers a resonant, intricate saga of the multigenerational Bailey/Schumpeter family of Abbeville, a farming community in central Illinois. Karl Schumpeter goes to work as a clerk at his uncle’s logging outfit before moving at the end of the 19th century to cosmopolitan Chicago to deal in grain futures. Once married, young Karl returns to Abbeville and prospers as an entrepreneur and banker. Almost 40 at the outbreak of WWI, Karl oddly travels to France to serve in the ambulance corps (showing shades of Hemingway, another Illinoisan). Later, after Black Tuesday, Karl’s illegal loans to friends and family land him in prison. Impoverished and humiliated, Karl eventually returns home to Abbeville and the shell of his former life. Years later, Karl’s grandson, George Bailey, loses his livelihood in the dot-com bust and searches for meaning and strength by examining Karl’s earlier travails. However, the dot-com bust pales when juxtaposed to the 1929 crash. The tales of the past generations feel more compelling and immediate. Fuller’s a talented writer, and his gifts are on full display when chronicling Karl’s life and times.

June 1, 2008
Drawing loosely on the life of his grandfather, Fullera Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer who has authored several novelstraces the story of Karl Schumpeter from the late 19th through the mid-20th century. From humble German farmer stock, Karl is taken under the wing of his uncle, first working for his logging operation, then for the Chicago Board of Trade. He has a brief romance with the streetwise Luella before returning to his hometown of Abbeville to marry his childhood sweetheart, Cristina. During the course of the novel, Karl makes and loses a fortune and discovers life's true value. There is a framing story involving Karl's grandson that isn't particularly well integrated into the rest of the plot, and many of the characters, particularly Karl and Cristina, don't really come to life until the book's concluding chapters. But the book has some true things to say about very American ideas of manhood and success and the relationships among fathers, sons, brothers, grandfathers, and grandsons. Recommended for public libraries.Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2008
Fuller, author of The Best of Jackson Payne (2000), a superb jazz novel, now turns to a more conventional, multigenerational tale of life in Middle America. Although the story of a grandfather and his grandson, both entrepreneurs who fall on hard times, is less complex structurally and thematically than the saga of saxophone phenom Payne, it, too, findsthe deep core of humanity in its characters. George, the grandson, a Chicago financier whose career crashes when the dot-com bubble bursts, turns for guidance to the life of his grandfather, Karl, a Central Illinois businessman, whose fortune was lost in the Depression. Jumping between George and Karl, Fuller moves from logging in Michigans North Woods, through commodities trading in early-twentieth-century Chicago, to farming in small-town Abbeville, Illinois, following Karls attempts to build a legacy and then to reconstruct a life after the legacy crumbles. Each segment of the story pulses with the emotion of felt life, but it is the cumulative effect, the building realization of what family interconnectedness can mean to the individual, that gives this old-fashioned novel its contemporary power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)