Darlington's Fall

by Brad Leithauser

The hero of this one-of-a-kind novel is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero. We meet him in the year 1895—a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, appealing man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marriage; across the Pacific, where on a tiny, rainy island he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman.

Darlington’s Fall is ultimately a love story. It is written in verse that—vivid, accessible, and lush—imparts an intensity to the story and its luminous gallery of characters: Russel’s rich, taciturn, up-right, guilt-driven father; Miss Kraus, his formidable housekeeper; Ernst Schrock, his maddening, gluttonous mentor; and Pauline Beaudette, the beautiful, ill-starred girl who becomes his wife. Leithauser’s embracingly compassionate outlook invites us into their world—into a past so sharply realized it feels like the present.

In Darlington’s Fall , Brad Leithauser offers an ingeniously plotted story and the virtues long associated with his elegant stanzas: wit, music, and a keen eye for the natural world. His independent careers as novelist and poet come together brilliantly here, producing something rare and wonderful in the landscape of contemporary American writing: a book that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Novel In Verse, Novels

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

BRAD LEITHAUSER is a widely acclaimed poet and novelist and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship. This is his seventeenth book. He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore and Amherst.

Reviews

[Bettie]

with drawings by Mark Leithauser

dedication:

For Mary Jo
for whom I fell

Opening:

In time he came to see his life
As borne by a pair of wings unequal to the weight
Of all his dreams. He fell. First air then leaves,
Slipping, branches that might of held him, snapping instead,
And he hit the grounnd, and tumbled down a hole,
Through a rib cage opened like a tomb,
Somersaulting over buried family lives,
Towns, taxonomies, down the scaateered wrecks
Of outsize extictinctions, and reached the salt shores of Hell
And kept falling. He came to rest in time
On another shore - his own - and stood,
And walked, and watched the sun in disbelief
Dance on the grey-hearted sea, the moon lay white
Soothing hand upon the broken rocks.

This is a novel about the naturalist Russel Darlington and we meet him in the year 1895. The fortunes of this romantic hero are laid out in poetic form and it begins to grate.

Really grates.

Maybe I should leave this until my rocking chair days, or perhaps I should wam the family this winter in a grate in the grate time-honoured fashion.

It is clever, almost beguiling, however not for me at this time. NEXT

[Raul Clement]

Quite simply this is one of the most stunning technical achievements in literature. The rhymes are effortlessly casual and don't really follow any pattern except that each line in a stanza gets a rhyme within that same stanza. Damn good story too -- about a naturalist named Russell Darlington and the various ways in which he falls: a literal fall while chasing butterflies which leaves him crippled; falling in love with the wrong woman; a spiritual fall; and so on.

[Katrinka]

Can't figure out how to rate this one. Definitely enjoyed it and the form it took—but can't figure out whether it was my own (pretty baseless) bias against overt rhyme that cast an unfair judgment upon it or what.

[Star]

One of my favorite books - so beautifully & cleverly written!

[Benjamin]

A novel-in-verse, loosely tied stanzas of ten lines each. Not as technically strict as some other long verse I've read, but that allowed Leithauser to almost entirely avoid the clunky passages that haunt even the best poets when they take on long poetry. Some truly beautiful passages in this. A pleasure.

[Kim]

Besides being written entirely in verse (even a horrible bout of diarrhea is made poetic), Leithauser succeeds in conveying a vignette about humans' awe of the universe, particularly when it comes to the "butterfly" effects that influence ancestry and love.

[Jake Berlin]

truly an incredible achievement -- leithauser creates a beautiful ode to science and nature that reads like a novel without losing its poetic heart.

[Jeffrey]

What a stunning novel in verse - not as charming as The Golden Gate but wonderfully evocative