Again, I need to be able to add that half star; it wasn't perfection but oh so very close! ( )

Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz continues the story from his novel Reservation Road. Dwight Arno is now fifty years old and out of prison. He is now living in California and is the manager of a sporting goods store. Dwight is surprised by an unexpected visitor, his estranged son, Sam. Sam has left college in Connecticut and is running from something he has done. Northwest Corner examines the lives of ordinary men and woman who are all damaged in some way and are all searching for meaning and redemption.

All the chapters are short and each one is from the point of view of a different character. Rest assured, though, that you do not need to have read Reservation Road in order to appreciate Northwest Corner. For those who have read Reservation Road, the characters include: Dwight, Sam, Ruth, Penny (Dwight's girlfriend), and Emma Learner.

Schwartz explores his damaged characters, their desires and fears, while slowly building an emotional tension that should resonate with most readers. The characters are all so very, very real - so true to life.The sheer raw emotion that leaps off the page is heart wrenching, yet does not feel manufactured. The characters feel like real people. You know these people. You feel their sadness and despair. You may have been through circumstances similar to these tortured souls. You will hope that they find redemption, that there is some resolution to their pain.

This is an incredible novel, exquisitely written. Schwartz is a gifted, poetic writer with a keen sharp insight into human character. There are observations throughout the novel that are brilliant gems of perfect cut and clarity. His descriptions transport you into the scene with the characters. While the plot itself is not full of action, the emotional landscape explored is packed full to overflowing.

Very Highly Recommended - one of the best; http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/
( )

I don't know how this would be as a standalone novel, as I read Reservation Road just beforehand. In some ways, I liked this better; a little tighter focus on a few individuals. I am reminded of Anne Frank's father (Otto?) saying, "We never really know our children." We never really know our parents. We never really know one another. And yet...Kurt Vonnegut was fond of quoting his own son, Mark, saying (and this might be a paraphrase): "We're here to help one another through this, whatever it is." ( )

John Burnham Schwartz's NORTHWEST CORNER is simply one of the most moving, page-turning novels I have read in a long time. With his super short and precisely worded chapters, Mr. Schwartz's writing is evocative proof positive that less is indeed more. Here's an early sample that let me know I was going to love this book. Protagonist Dwight Arno, a divorced ex-con who has not seen his son in more than a decade, suddenly has him back in his life, and he doesn't know how to deal with it. Watching him sleep, he is suddenly afraid his son is dead -

"I'm halfway to the bed, stepping panicked over my set of dumbbells strewn across the rubber-matted floor, when I see his chest rise. I stop to watch him breathing in and out, until I'm sure."

A simple enough description of a father's sudden and unreasonable panic for the safety of his child, albeit a 22 year-old one. It made me remember when I was a new father and would often lean over my infant son's sleeping body, watching, listening to him breathe, sometimes touching him to be sure. Dwight Arno may have been an absent father, a distant father, but even then, after years apart from his son, he was still very much a father. Schwartz is a master of finding the right word, the perfect phrase. The kind of writing I found here, in NORTHWEST CORNER, is rare and precious. It packs a powerful emotional punch.

I know that this novel is a sequel to an earlier one, RESERVATION ROAD. I gotta read that book. In the meantime, I will press this one on anyone who appreciates fine writing. Very highly recommended. ( )

Told in alternate chapters, all third person, except for Dwight Arno. Schwartz uses not only alternate points of view but also goes back in forth in time from 1975, when the hit and run accident which unites all characters, occurred and the present. The parallel between the present and the past is an accident in which Dwight's estranged son Sam is involved. I found this technique to be far more effective in generating tension in pacing and empathy with the characters than a straight ahead narrative. I live in the Northwest corner so that aspect was particularly intriguing for me. This novel combines drama, well drawn characters using minimal description and good, simple writing. ( )

After I finished Reservation Road, countless questions lingered amid disparate emotions coupled not only with the painful narrative which continued to haunt me, but also the enduring legacy foisted upon the memorable characters of Dwight, Sam, and Ruth of the Arno family pitted against Ethan, Grace, and Emma Lerner begging to be explored.

Twelve years later, Northwest Corner spiritedly revisits Dwight Arno, outwardly transformed and contrite, vaguely expectant in his new West Coast surroundings, mindful of the compulsory physical and emotional distance essential to create a life anew without relentless reminders of one careless moment that shattered two families into irrevocable pieces. The pivotal tragedy alone did not thrust Dwight into these recent circumstances; rather his immediate unforgivable response mingled with excessive evasive subterfuge disqualified him from any possible future in his previously fractured existence.

Once the solitary motivation in Dwight's circumspect memories, his collegiate son Sam now stands in a similar place after his violent and physically brutal attack upon another young man as he hastily chooses an unplanned disparate course of action, an abrupt departure from his UConn dorm room, West Coast bound aboard a Greyhound bus to Santa Barbara and his father. When the sins of the father become a heavy burden to bear alone and lie befuddled upon a son's hazy conscience, the ominous consequences of inexplicable rage are quickly disowned.

Succinctly, yet sparingly the author reveals the parsimonious remnants of each affected character's life. He unconsciously captures you with his eloquent words and deftly draws you in to vicariously endure those profusely diverse emotions deftly woven within the gritty details that accompany life's most unexpected torturous moments accompanied by their insurmountable losses.

If John Burnham Schwartz's intent is to unceremoniously immerse the reader into each distinctively disquieting character's churning vortex of inner thoughts and feelings, he is successful beyond all expectations. Every single page is a pithy volume of overwhelmingly unforgettable words that linger long after it is read. Minute corners of the mind and heart are brutally bared until mercy finally prevails. Ultimately love empowers and redemption triumphs. ( )

Predictable soap opera with ex-con father (for hit & run), his on the run son (for walloping another kid into the ICU with baseball bat in a bar fight), the cancer victim ex-wife, the mother & daughter of hit & run victim. All of the above and a few more recovering misfits run into each other figuratively and literally. And there's a (acutally two) predictable unpredictable romance. Can you already guess?
The writing is better than the plot, but I found the switching among viewpoints with a zillion brief chapters offputting. I liked it enough to finish it - but barely. ( )

You don't need to have read or watched Reservation Road to appreciate the characters, their dilemmas or the writing in Northwest Corner. Schwartz captures the complexity, heaviness, and hopelessness so well.

* Dwight Arno at fifty. He's been released from prison and built a new life on the other side of the country, surrounded by people that don't know his past. Only his employer knows about his record and it has never been an issue at the sporting goods store where he works. His old life as a corporate lawyer in Connecticut with a family and a beautiful house is another life altogether.
* Sam Arno, a college athlete, who runs from his own tragedy. We learn how his childhood was tainted by his father's reputation and how Sam has worked to create a normal life for himself. The friendships that he's kept and the one girl that he is drawn to add another layer to the story.
* Ruth, Sam's mother, faces problems of her own. As she struggles with medical issues, she fights her instinct to contact her son. Schwartz captures the delicate balance that we often fail to meet as we try to give people the space that they seem to want.

The small actions and quiet dialogue convey so much emotion and complex personal histories. Northwest Corner is a powerful, engrossing read. Authentic and beautifully written, Northwest Corner isn't a light summer read, but it's a book that will stay with you long after you've finished reading.

ISBN-10: 1400068452 Hardcover $26.00
Publisher: Random House; 1St Edition edition (July 26, 2011), 304 pages.
Review copy provided by TLC Book Tours and the publisher. ( )

Receiving this book, I decided to order Reservation Road to read first. I enjoyed Reservation Road, the tension that builds throughout the book is really amazing.
I found NW corner to be disappointing. I didn't really care that much about what happened to the characters and the intense tension from the first book was missing. ( )

A continuation of the story told in Reservation Road, Northwest Corner is a spare and minimalist novel that packs a huge punch. We return to the story of Dwight Arno whose horrible mistake cost him just about everything, including contact with his son, Sam. When Sam turns up on his doorstep, a college senior and varsity superstar, who badly injured another boy in a bar fight. He's been expelled from school and criminal charges are imminent. His only real relationship is with the sister of the the boy his father accidentally hit with his car.

This is a dark novel and was hard for me to read because of how much it made me feel. Schwartz can write and this will haunt me for awhile. Its minimalist writing style stands in stark relief to the depth of the story (and the tragedy of it). Not a comfortable read, but a worthwhile one. ( )

I read the prequel to this book years ago, and along with other reviewers, feel that this book was equal to or even better than the first. I particularly enjoyed the alternating points of view showing the ripple effects of the accident that had happened eight years earlier. None of these characters chose to have these life experiences, even the ones whose actions caused pain to others; it is an excellent description of just how life is. I enjoyed it. ( )

I received this book from Early Reviewers and realized it was a sequel and that somehow the first novel had slipped past my “reader’s radar.” I cheated and got Reservation Road from Netflix and enjoyed it more than I expected to. It was well done and gave me a good idea of the storyline. Once I started reading Northwest Corner, I couldn’t put it down. Beautifully written, the story picks up several years after the death of the Learner’s young son. Told in short alternating paragraphs from the view point of each character, we learn of the devastated lives of both families; Dwight Arno who hit and killed the boy, and the Learners who so tragically lost their son. Arno’s ex-wife and son again weigh into the story, and after all is said and done, one has to feel empathy for each and every one involved. There’s no real bad guy to hate and no answer to the question everyone must deal with in their own way… why this happened and how to carry on their lives from this point. ( )

Sparse & poetic, the prose in John Burnham Schwartz's Northwest Corner moved me. It is the story of a broken family, written from the points of view of five characters. Fifty-year old Dwight had left his family and moved from the east coast to California after spending two and a half years in prison for killing a child in a hit & run accident. His ex-wife, Ruth, is recovering from cancer. She had raised their son, Sam, who loves her, but is increasingly uncommunicative. When Sam, in a fit of violence, injures another college student, he is filled with self-hatred and seeks out his father, whom he hasn't seen in many years. Emma, the sister of the killed child, and Penny, Dwight's love interest in California, round out the cast. Northwest Corner is a novel about learning to accept oneself and one's family. After reading this book, I feel I need to make a change to my comments in the thread "Which is your Favorite LTER Win?" Northwest Corner is my new favorite. ( )

A sequel to Reservation Road, Northwest Corner picks up with most of the characters of the first novel about 8 years later after Dwight Arno has served his prison term for the hit and run death of a young child and relocated from Connecticut to California. Meanwhile Dwight's ex-wife, Ruth has remarried and now separated from her second husband and has recently had breast cancer, and his son, Sam has grown into an angry depressed college student and athlete. The parents of the child killed in the first book are informally separated and their daughter, Emma, is now also a college student. No one in these families is happy; all of them continue to suffer the contiunuing tragedy of loss of the child.

Schwartz works very well with these characters, parsing out the original story and giving the reader a real feel for their sad and conflicted emotions. Dwight has been largely absent from his son's life for 8 years and now father and son struggle, physicially and emotionally, to form some new relationship. Ruth struggles too, over the past and also over her own uncertain future with concerns about her health and fear of loneliness as a single middle aged woman with no child at home. The mother of the dead boy, is still deep in grief and and tries in vain to throw herself into her work to overcome this debilitating anguish. The young people carry the guilt of their parents' behavior and losses and yearn to somehow make a fresh start.

As a reader who enjoyed Reservation Road, I thought this sequel was great, but I think that I appreciated it because of the character development of the first book. The facts of the events of 8 years ago are interspersed well throughout the story, but we do not experience the hurt and the torment suffered by the charactrs in Reservation Road. And without that depth of background these characters may come off as just a group of very depressed people.

I recommend this novel, but only after the reader experiences Reservation Road.

Thanks to Library Thing Early Reviewers for a chance to read and review this book. ( )

John Burnham Schwartz's fifth novel, Northwest Corner (forthcoming from Random House) is a standalone sequel to Reservation Road, featuring several of the same characters several years later. The book is told from the alternating perspectives of college student Sam Arno, his estranged father Dwight and ailing mother Ruth, Dwight's paramour Penny, and Emma, a young woman of an age with Sam whose connection to the family I should let the reader discover.

When Sam seriously injures a fellow student in a bar fight and then flees to his father in California, the family and those around them are drawn into a whirlwind of consequences as their past and present trials and decisions swirl around them.

I had a hard time putting the book down after I opened it; it's written with a well-paced immediacy that practically demands that it be read all at once. The characters are so troublingly real, so frustratingly human, it's difficult not to understand them (even if some of their actions might be incomprehensible), and I wanted to know what would happen to them, which choices they would make and what those would mean.

A fine addition to your summer reading list, I'd say.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2011/06/book-review-northwest-corner.html ( )

I really enjoyed this book, it is a quick read on the one side but it makes you think and reread passages on the other side. The way the author talkes about the different people-every person gets hins own chapter- is a little confusing at the beginning of the book, but it makes you courious how all these people relate to each other.
I did not read other books form John B. Schwartz but I will find more from him, I woud recommend Northwest corner to teenager and adults. ( )

The writing in this novel is really beautiful. There are so many wonderful sentences and painfully accurate descriptions of the characters' feelings that there's a lot to love about the way this novel is put together. After reading the first half of the book, I was ready to rave about it.

The story, though, isn't as good as the writing. The ostensible main character, Sam, commits a violent act at the beginning of the book, and the story kind of meanders along as Sam runs away from and then back towards the consequences of what he's done, a journey that is similar in some respects to one his father took twenty years earlier after accidentally hitting and killing a child with his car. This parallel is, I think, not as enlightening as Schwartz means it to be, and I'm not sure if having read Reservation Road, in which these characters first appear, would help at all in that department. Towards the end, the narrative gets bogged down in an overly complicated chain of events that feels artificial and contrived solely for the purpose of trying to convince the reader that the stakes for Sam may be even higher - but they aren't. As that part of the plot plays out, the narrative runs aground elsewhere with an overlong and poorly-executed consultation with a lawyer (whose equally contrived relationship with the family is its own unnecessary subplot) that doesn't make a lot of sense or add anything to the story except, again, an attempt to create urgency that falls flat.

I'm curious to see whether Reservation Road suffers from similar problems. The characters in Northwest Corner are interesting and well-drawn, and, as I said, the writing is really beautiful. I wanted to like this book so much, but the seams of the story were visible all over the place. I wonder if Schwartz had told the story without resurrecting characters from an earlier book whether some of the problems might have been avoided - whether the conflicts and the constant upping of the stakes might have come across as less hamfisted if it weren't billed as a "like father, like son" kind of tale. ( )

[Northwest Corner] is John Burham Schwartz's follow through to [Reservation Road] but stands well on it's own (confession: I always meant to read the earlier work but never got around to it. I'll be taking care of that soon). In Reservation Road, lawyer Dwight Arno hits and kills a classmate of his son, Sam, who is in the back seat of the car at the time, as they are driving home in a hurry to his ex-wife's house. He leaves the scene and doesn't confess to the crime until months later when he is confronted by the boy's father.

[Northwest Corner] opens several years after Dwight has completed his sentence and, in the traditional trajectory of the outcast, fled west to California. He hasn't seen his son in years, perhaps since he went to prison, and when Sam shows up on his doorstep after fleeing the consequences of a violent incident at college, it would seem that the sins of the father are destined to shape the fate of the son.

While the novel explores the relationship between father and son and how each shapes the other's life for good and ill, the strongest presence in the book is neither Dwight nor Sam, but the many years dead Josh Lerner. The lost son whose absence is so vitally felt that it becomes another character, a black hole at the center of the survivors' universe, and how the survivors interact with this Josh-in-absentia is at the core of the novel. There is a flashback scene in the center of the book where Josh pokes and prods at the bloated carcass of a deer and his father admonishes him to leave the dead in peace, but this admonishment proves impossible to heed for those left standing after Josh's death. They cluster in small, interweaving groups around his absence, never intersecting until the end of the novel.

Caveat: I have not read [Reservation Road]. After reading the blurb describing NW Corner as continuing the characters of that book, I fully intended to set this book aside until I had, but then I peeked at the first couple chapters and thought I would never make it through 2 books about baseball. It also seemed as if the initial chapters gave sufficient background that I wouldn't be completely at sea.
I do resent male authors who have a female character mentally describing her body as "tits and ass" (p. 13) so I wasn't predisposed to enjoy the book. I did notice how people never eat--their planned meals are always interrupted by a scene--and Sam always says he's not hungry when someone offers him food (this from a college-aged male?)

Schwartz scatters intriguing metaphors and similes across his pages, but the underlying theme of people's lives falling apart overpowers their pull, so that I can only hope to get through the book without absorbing any of its poison. One quote (p.33) seems to summarize the point of this novel: "Like most guys of my ilk (whatever that means) I'm in all likelihood just another salmon narcissist, ever returning to the corpse-strewn spawning ground of me, where one day, unless something even worse happens, I too will quietly expire."
I can imagine my brother--oldest son, spent his entire life doing what was expected, now divorced and confused about what's happened to him--reading this. Or my son-in-law, fifteen years from now (if he were the type of person to crack a book cover). But not a woman, voluntarily.
Maybe the character Ruth sums up the reason this book fails to connect with me "She's of the stubborn bag-lady genus: bringing it all with her wherever she goes, hoarding the past not because it's better but because it's the only thing she seems to own." (p 209) while I am continually shedding my past, letting go.
A good story should give you hope and motivation for being the best person you can be, not drag you down into a pointless existence. That positive outlook is what we are given in the ending. I'm still not sure if the change of emotions is permanent--or even believable, whether the separate acts of generous love and acceptance will be enough to overcome a history of anger and pain. Schwartz gives an ending people crave in this disjointed society, but it is built on fragile ice. ( )

This is a tremendous story in which Schwartz thrillingly, painstakingly, and triumphantly rebuilds the family torn apart in Reservation Road. It is a thoroughly fascinating and page-turning return for the family of Dwight Arno. The redemption in this tale after the devastation of Reservation Road is pure pleasure.

I started this book with some trepidation since I had not read Reservation Road. However, the book stands alone and is an enjoyable read. The characterizations are very well done, particularly that of Dwight Arno. Sam, his confused son, is somewhat less sympathetic, although that may be because I am closer to Dwight's age than Sam's. Schwartz's writing was smooth and engrossing. I probably would not have read the book if it hadn't been an Early Review copy, but I am glad I did. ( )

Northwest Corner is Schwartz's followup to his earlier novel, Reservation Road. I had not read the earlier story, so I was hoping that this wouldn't be one of those sequels that one has to have read the first story to know what was going on. Northwest Corner does stand on it's own, but the author keeps things pretty vague about the basis of the characters personal turmoils until much later in the story. Overall, it is a good "take to the beach" kind of story and a quick read. ( )

Fans of John Burnham Schwartz will not want to miss this story. If you loved Reservation Road, you should add this to your list of books you want to read. I felt some confusion at the beginning -- thinking maybe I missed a critical piece of the story. But it quickly became clear, and I like revisiting the characters at this point in their history.

The follow up to "Reservation Road" which was one of the author's best, with some of the same characters including Dwight Arno, who years earlier was involved in a hit and run of a small boy. The story takes up several years later with Dwight trying to make a life for himself after serving time in prison and his son Sam suddenly showing up in his life after twelve years running from his own misfortune. A somewhat dark book but showing the many ways a family deals with a tragic accident and how some families never fully recover. ( )