Love Hurts: Brian Hart’s “Then Came the Evening”

By Jenny Shank, 1-03-10

Then Came The Evening
by Brian Hart
Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $25

In the opening scene of his surefooted debut novel, Idaho native Brian Hart introduces the luckless character around which Then Came The Evening revolves, Bandy Dorner, who is still drunk after a night of carousing in Lake Fork, a town in rural Idaho where his family has lived for generations: “Bandy Dorner woke to a fogged windshield, cracked and spattered with mud and grass, the watery shadows of two policemen banging on his car hood with their fists.” It is the early ‘70s and Bandy has returned from the Vietnam War a roughened, inconsiderate man.  Bandy’s cabin has burned down and he believes his common-law wife, Iona, has died in the fire.  His loss makes him want “to kill somebody,” and Bandy disarms one of the cops and shoots him with his own gun, unprovoked.  Meanwhile, we learn that Iona had in fact left with another man, having grown weary of Bandy’s unreliable ways. 

In the second chapter, set in 1990, Iona reveals to Bandy, now in prison for killing the cop, that she had been pregnant before she left and their son Tracy, now 18, wants to meet him.  Hart constructs a taut drama around the attempt of these three wounded characters to build something out of the wreckage of their lives.  Hart could hardly have chosen a more unsympathetic trio, characters perpetually down on their luck in part because of misfortunes that they can’t control, but mostly because of ill-considered choices that they make.  And yet Hart earns the reader’s attention to them, if not always sympathy for them, in large part through the beauty and simplicity of his rhythmic prose, his natural dialogue, and his elegant evocations of the landscape and portrayals of how the characters’ shifting identities fit into the evolving town, which has changed immeasurably since Bandy went to prison.

When Tracy goes to visit Bandy in prison, his father observes, “He was as tall as Bandy but thinner: more cat, less bull.” Tracy needs a fresh start.  He has been living in Spokane with Iona and his aunt after the death of his stepfather, and his aunt’s drinking, drug abuse, sleeping with strange men and occasional prostitution has been a bad influence on Iona and has left Tracy yearning to put miles between himself and their mess. 

After the death of his parents, Bandy inherited their house and land in Lake Fork, and he gives Tracy permission to go live there.  It’s impossible not to root for Tracy, equipped with gumption and carpentry skills, as he sets out to fix the trashed house that’s been looted in its owners’ absence.  “He wondered, on a blood level, how much do you get from one parent and how much do you get from the other?  Standing on Dorner land, his life suddenly seemed full of dark possibility.”

The nearest neighbors, the Guntlys, welcome Tracy, glad to find one remaining, unexpected Dorner, hoping that he can turn the fortunes of the family around.  Tracy’s interactions with the crotchety Wilhelm Guntly are some of Hart’s best work.  Although they are new to each other, their dialogue is wry and laden with their shared history; they quickly fall into grandparent and grandson roles.  Tracy likes to bait Wilhelm, who is cranky about the new subdivisions and huge second homes for wealthy people that have sprung up in the town:

“‘You couldn’t imagine what it was like before the swarms arrived,’ Wilhelm said.  There was something smug in his voice that stopped Tracy from simply agreeing with him…
‘Swarms,’ Tracy said.
‘People with money,’ Wilhelm said.  ‘We’re being colonized.’
‘You can’t be colonized by people in your own country.’
‘If somebody builds a golf course within a mile of my house, that’s colonization: an act of war.’”

The fortunes of Tracy, Iona, and Bandy rise and fall as Then Came The Evening plays out.  It would spoil the surprises in the carefully plotted book to say exactly how (the denouement begins with an ill-fated trip to Montana).  But along the way Hart writes of their work and experiences in prison or in blue-collar jobs with convincing detail.  Hart doesn’t offer any easy solutions to the trouble the Dorners have gotten themselves into, and he writes with emotional honesty from all of the characters’ perspectives, such as in this passage when Iona has reached a low point:

“She put her sandwich down on the table and went into her bedroom and found a half pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the floor and was about to light one but she crumpled the pack instead and went outside, barefoot still, gingerly across the parking lot and threw them into the otherwise empty dumpster.  It was an easy thing and probably hollow but it left her feeling uplifted.  She had to get better.  She had to try and get better.  This was no way to live.  She wasn’t naïve enough to think that quitting smoking would change anything but she had to start somewhere.”

It takes a rare writer to be able to convince a reader to follow a group of bad-news characters to such bleak places, but Brian Hart’s prose makes the story enjoyable, even when the events it describes are not.  In Then Came The Evening, Hart has achieved a consistency of tone, a concision of description, and an intensity of focus that make for a satisfying drama.

Brian Hart will read from his book in Boise on January 7 at Rediscovered Bookshop (7 p.m.), January 8 at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oreg. (7:30 p.m.), and on January 10 in Bellingham, Wash. at Village Books (4 p.m.).